Clinton Official at
Rambouillet:
"We intentionally
Set Compliance Bar Too High For Serbs
to Comply"
Jim Jatras
Remarks at conference:
"NATO's Balkan War: Finding an Honorable Exit."
organized by CATO Institute
Washington, DC
May 18, 1999
Let me state at the outset that my remarks here today do not
represent any Senate office or member. Rather, I am giving my professional
judgement as a policy analyst and my personal opinion, for both of which I
am solely responsible.
The rationale for U.S. intervention in Kosovo and for assistance
to the Kosovo Liberation Army is easily stated. It goes something like this:
"The current crisis in Kosovo is simply the latest episode in the
aggressive drive by extreme Serbian nationalism, orchestrated by
Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, to create an ethnically pure
Greater Serbian state. This aggression -- first in Slovenia, then in
Croatia, and then in Bosnia, -- has now come to Kosovo, largely because
the West, notably NATO, refused to stand up to him.
"Prior to 1989, Kosovo was at peace under an autonomy that allowed
the Albanian people a large degree of self-rule. That status quo was
disturbed by the Serbs by the revocation of Kosovo's autonomy and the
initiation of an apartheid system of ethnic discrimination. Now, after a
decade of oppression by the Serbs, the Albanians of Kosovo are faced
with a pre-planned program of genocide, similar to that committed by the
Serbs in Bosnia. The rise of the KLA is a response to this threat.
"The United States and the international community first exhausted
the possibilities for a diplomatic settlement to the crisis, repeatedly
offering the Serbs the opportunity to accept the Rambouillet agreement,
a peaceful solution that would be fair to all parties. But while the
Albanians, including the KLA, chose the path of negotiation and peace,
the Serbs rejected it. Accordingly, NATO had no choice but to move ahead
with a military response, namely airstrikes, which in Bosnia forced the
Serbs to the peace table. The campaign is directed against Milosevic and
his security apparatus, not against the Serbian people.
"Unfortunately, as the Serbs moved ahead with their pre-planned
program of genocide the NATO air campaign could not stop the
displacement of hundreds of thousands of Albanians. While air power may
ultimately bring the Serbs to heel, a just and speedy solution requires
a ground component. Some advocate a NATO ground offensive, but there are
concerns about the potential costs. Others advocate a program of arming
and training the KLA the victims of Serbian aggression and genocide to
liberate their own country. In any case, to fail to achieve NATO's
objectives is completely unacceptable. International stability would be
threatened, and American and NATO credibility would be destroyed if
genocide were allowed to succeed in the heart of Europe at the dawn of
the 21st Century.
That, in a nutshell, is the case. I have tried to paraphrase as
closely as possible the arguments of supporters of the Clinton policy.
The trouble is: hardly any part of the summary
justification I just gave is true. Some parts of it are skewed or
exaggerated interpretations of the facts, some are outright lies.
However, as in Bosnia, the Clinton Administration's Kosovo policy cannot
be justified without recasting a frightfully complex conflict, with plenty
of blame to go around, as a caricature: a morality play in black and white
where one side is completely innocent and the other entirely villainous.
To start with, pre-1989 Kosovo was hardly the
fantasyland of ethnic tolerance the pro-intervention caricature makes it
out to be. Under the 1974 Tito constitution, which
elevated Kosovo to effective equality with the federal republics, Kosovo's
Albanians exercised virtually complete control over the provincial
administration. Tens, perhaps hundreds, of
thousands of Serbs left during this period in the face of pervasive
discrimination and the authorities' refusal to protect Serbs from ethnic
violence. The result of the shift in the ethnic balance that
accelerated during this period is the main claim ethnic Albanians lay to
exclusive ownership of Kosovo. At the same time,
Albanian demands mounted that the province be detached from Serbia and
given republic status within the Yugoslav federation; republic status, if
granted, would, in theory, have allowed Kosovo the legal right to declare
its independence from Yugoslavia. One of the ironies of the present
Kosovo crisis is that Milosevic began his rise to power in Serbia in large
part because of the oppressive character of pre-1989 Albanian rule in
Kosovo, symbolized by the famous 1987 rally where he promised the local
Serbs: "Nobody will beat you again." In short, rather
than Milosevic being the cause of the Kosovo crisis, it would be as
correct to say that intolerant Albanian nationalism in Kosovo is largely
the cause of Milosevic's attainment of power.
Second, in 1989 Kosovo's autonomy was
not revoked but was downgraded -- at the federal level at
Milosevic's initiative -- to what it had been before 1974. Many Albanians refused to accept Belgrade's reassertion of
authority and large numbers were fired from their state jobs. The resulting standoff -- of boycott and the creation of
alternative institutions on the Albanian side and of increasingly severe
police repression on the Serbian side -- continued for most of the 1990s.
Again, the political problem in Kosovo -- up until the bombing began --
has always been: how much autonomy will the Kosovo Albanians settle
for? When I hear now that autonomy is not enough and that only
independence will suffice, I can't help but think of Turkish Kurdistan
where not only have the Kurds never been offered any kind of autonomy but
even suggesting there ought to be autonomy will land you in jail. But of
course we don't bomb Turkey over the Kurds; on the contrary, as a NATO
member Turkey is one of the countries helping to bomb the Serbs.
Third, while after 1989 there was a tense stand-off in Kosovo,
what we did not have was open warfare. That was the
result not of any pre-planned Serbian program of "ethnic cleansing" but of
the KLA's deliberate and I would say classic strategy to turn a political
confrontation into a military confrontation. Attacks directed against not only Serbian police and
officials but Serbian civilians and insufficiently militant Albanians were
undoubtedly, and accurately, calculated to trigger a massive and largely
indiscriminate response by Serbian forces. The growing cycle of
violence, in turn, further radicalized Kosovo's Albanians and led to the
possibility of NATO military involvement, which, I submit, based on the
Bosnia precedent, was the KLA's real goal rather than any realistic
expectation of victory on the battlefield. In every respect, it has been a
stunningly successful strategy.
Fourth, the Clinton Administration's claim
that NATO resorted to force only after diplomacy failed is a flat
lie. As I pointed out in a paper issued by the Policy Committee
in August of last year, the military planning for intervention was largely
in place at that time, and all that was lacking was a suitable pretext.
The Holbrooke-Milosevic agreement of October 1998 --
to which the KLA was not a party -- mandated a partial Serb
withdrawal, during which the KLA occupied
roughly half of Kosovo and cleansed! dozens of villages of their Serb
inhabitants. Any reaction on the Serb side, however, risked NATO
bombing.
Finally, the Rambouillet process cannot be
considered a negotiation under any normal definition of the
word: A bunch of lawyers at the State
Department write up a 90-page document and then push it in front of the
parties and say: "Sign it. And if you (one of the parties) sign it and he
(the other party) doesn't then we'll bomb him." And of course, when
they said that, Secretary Albright and the State Department knew that one
of the parties would not, and could not, sign the agreement. Why? Because -- as has received far too little attention from our
supposedly inquisitive media -- it provided for NATO occupation of not
just Kosovo but of all of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) under Paragraph 8 of Appendix B: "8. NATO personnel shall
enjoy, together with their vehicles, vessels, aircraft, and equipment,
free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access through out the FRY
[i.e., the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia], including associated air space
and territorial waters. This shall include, but not be limited to, the
right of bivouac, maneuver, billet, and utilization of any areas or
facilities as required for support, training, and operations."
I have it on good authority that one senior
Administration official told media at Rambouillet (under
embargo) "We intentionally set the bar too
high for the Serbs to comply. They need some bombing, and that's what they
are going to get." In short, Rambouillet was
just Albright's charade to get to where we are now: a bombing
campaign. Their big mistake was, they thought their splendid little war
would have been over long before now. It's all happened just as they
planned, except the last part: Milosevic has refused to run up the white
flag.
Fifth, nobody can doubt there are serious
atrocities being committed in Kosovo by Milosevic's forces -- though the
extent and specifics of the reports that the media (as in Bosnia) treats
as established fact are open to question and have been characterized by
Agence France Presse (4/31) as on occasion being "confused, contradictory,
and sometimes plain wrong."
For the Administration and NATO, however, it does not appear to
detract from their propaganda value that "reports
coming from NATO and US officials" appear often as little more than
regurgitation of unconfirmed information from the KLA. I have in mind, for example, the report for a time being
peddled by Jamie Rubin, among others, that some 100,000 Albanian men had
been herded into the Pristina sports stadium until a reporter actually
went to the stadium and found it empty. At the same time, we should
not doubt that a lot more civilians, both Serb and Albanian are being
killed by NATO than we are willing to admit as the air strikes are
increasingly directed against what are euphemistically called
"infrastructure" -- i.e., civilian -- targets. Some Albanian refugees say
they are fleeing the Serbs, others NATO's bombs. The
Clinton Administration has vainly tried to claim that all the bloodshed
since March 24 has been Milosevic's fault, insisting that the offensive
would have taken place even if NATO had not bombed, but I find that
argument unconvincing. After the failure of the Rambouillet talks
and the breakdown of the October 1998 Milosevic-Holbrooke agreement, a
Serb action against the KLA may have been unavoidable -- and no doubt it
would have been conducted with the same light touch used by the Turks
against the PKK or by the Sri Lankans against the Tamil Tigers, who, like
the KLA, do not play by Marquis of Queensberry rules. But a full-scale drive to push out all or most ethnic
Albanians and unleash a demographic bomb against NATO staging areas in
Albania and Macedonia may not have been.
Sixth, because of how the Administration's
decision to bomb has turned Kosovo from a crisis into a disaster, we no
longer have a Kosovo policy -- we have a KLA policy. As
documented in a paper released by the Policy Committee on March 31, the
Clinton Administration has elevated to virtually unchallenged status as
the legitimate representative of the Kosovo Albanian people a terrorist
group about which there are very serious questions as to its criminal
activities particularly with regard to the drug trade and as to radical
Islamic influences, including Osama bin Ladin and the Iranians. Advocates of U.S. assistance to the KLA, such as the
Heritage Foundation, point out that based on the experience of
aiding the mujahedin in Afghanistan, we can use our help as a leverage for
"reforming" the KLA's behavior. However, I would ask which radical group
of any description, either in Afghanistan (where we could at least claim
the vicissitudes of the Cold War justified the risks), or the Izetbegovic
regime in Bosnia, or, on the same principle, the Castro regime in Cuba or
the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, or the PLO has ever genuinely a bandoned its
radical birthright for a mess of American pottage.
Seventh, advocates of aid to the KLA
suggest that it be contingent on guarantees that that organization not
attack civilians and not pursue a greater Albania beyond Kosovo.
Given the pre-1989 history of Kosovo and the KLA's
behavior to date, the first suggestion is laughable. As for the second, I submit for
your consideration a map from the webpage of the Albanian American
Civic League (www.aacl.com), a pro-KLA group in the United
States. It visually represents the areas
claimed by the KLA, including not only Kosovo but other areas of southern
Serbia, parts of Montenegro and Macedonia (including their capitals), and
parts of Greece. When I first saw this map which the webmaster has
made considerably harder to print since I first referenced it in my paper
it struck a recollection of some thing I had seen before. It occurred to me that it is quite similar to one I have
(printed by the State Department in 1947) of interim territorial
arrangements during World War II. I can understand that there is an
element of hyperbole in critics' calling NATO's air campaign "Nazi," but I fail to see what interest the United States has in
helping to restore the Nazi-imposed borders of 1943 or how this helps
preserve European stability.
Eighth, the Clinton claim that we are
hitting Milosevic and not the Serbian people is just cruel mockery.
Politically, this bombing has solidified his position as he never could
have done on his own. The Clinton Administration repeatedly rebuffed
initiatives by the Serbian opposition for support against Milosevic, most recently by a direct meeting with Madeleine Albright by
the Serbian Orthodox bishop of Kosovo, His Grace ARTEMIJE, in which
he appealed for an initiative that would have strengthened moderate forces
on both sides, begun genuine negotiations (in place of the Rambouillet
farce), and weakened Milosevic. (I have copies of this proposal here
today.) Predictably, that appeal fell on deaf ears.
But this Administration cannot say it was not warned.
Ninth, the Administration's "humanitarian"
justification for this war the contention that this is about returning
Albanian refugees to their homes is rank hypocrisy. Many commentators have noted that the Administration had
turned a blind eye to the cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Serbs
from the Krajina in 1995. This is not quite accurate. They did not
turn a blind eye, they actively abetted the Croatian
Army's "Operation Storm" with mercenary retired U.S. military consultants
to provide training and operational planning under the guise of "democracy
training." Indeed, there is evidence that U.S. assistance to the
eradication of the Krajina Serbs may have included air strikes and
psy-ops, but to my knowledge no member of our intrepid Fourth Estate has
yet seen fit to look into it.
Tenth, the notion that Milosevic is
nationalist bent on creating a "Greater Serbia" is nonsense.
Milosevic -- unlike the equally thuggish Franjo Tudjman and Alija
Izetbegovic -- is an opportunist, who likely would have been more than
willing to sell out Kosovo as he did the Serbs of Krajina and parts of
Bosnia, if the Clinton/Albright policy had not been so completely
incompetent as to paint him into corner where he had to stand and fight.
As for Greater Serbia -- as opposed to Greater Croatia or Greater Albania
-- it's all in the definitions.
The only consistent rule in the break-up of
Titoist Yugoslavia is that the Serbs, the only constituent nationality
that gave up their own national state to create Yugoslavia, have alone
been regarded as having no legitimate interest in how it broke up. One the
one hand, Serb minorities in other republics were expected to accept as
authoritative Tito's borders or be regarded as "aggressors" for wishing to
remain in the state in which they had up until them been
living. On the other hand, Kosovo, a region
that was part of Serbia even before Yugoslavia was created, is up for
grabs. The double standard is
breathtaking.
So what are we left with? The Clinton Administration's blunder has done nothing
but harm American interests and those of everybody else concerned.
It has harmed the Albanian refugees, making an
already bad situation much worse; harmed an unknown number of innocent
civilians, both Serbian and Albanian, killed or injured by our bombing;
harmed any prospects of political reform in Serbia that would remove
Milosevic from power; harmed the U.S. security posture, as our forces
around the world have been stripped down to devote resources to Kosovo;
harmed the already fragile stability of neighboring states and the region
as a whole; and harmed our relationship with Russia, which should be among
our first priorities -- having vindicated every lie the Soviet Union ever
told about NATO's aggressive intentions. And the harm grows worse every
day.
The question before us is finding an honorable
exit. Some suggest turning the current disaster into complete
catastrophe by sending in NATO ground troops under premises as faulty as
those that led to the air war. Arming and training the KLA would be
similarly ill-advised. That leaves pointlessly extending the air war -- or
looking for a way out, a diplomatic solution. I will let Rep. Weldon
describe his proposal as outlined in House Concurrent Resolution 99 which
seems to me the best idea on the table. I would add only one thing: we
need to stop the bombing as soon as possible. If what you are doing is
making things worse, stop what you're doing. If you have mistakenly put
gasoline on a fire instead of water don't pour on more.
Some will suggest that quitting while we're
behind would harm American and NATO's credibility and would be a victory
for Milosevic. But to a large extent, that
damage has already been done. As for NATO, what has been harmed so
far is less NATO's commitment to its collective defense mission under
Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty which has never been at stake in
Kosovo than what President Clinton has called the "new NATO" and Prime
Minister Blair a "new internationalism," which is nowhere provided for in
the Treaty.
What would, and should, collapse is the
misguided effort to transform NATO from a defensive alliance into a
regional peacekeeping organization, a mini-U.N. with "out-of-area"
responsibilities, a certain road to more Bosnias and more Kosovos down the
line. That mission would lose its credibility, fatally so, and so it
should. The Clinton Administration's incompetent policy in Kosovo
has had one small benefit: it has exposed fact that last year, when the
Senate gave its advice and consent to expansion of NATO's membership, it
also approved expansion of NATO's mission. If the Clinton Administration
and NATO are successful in Kosovo, not only will the principle of state
sovereignty in the face of an out-of-control international bureaucracy be
fatally compromised, we can expect (and indeed some observers already
have started to set out the case for) new and even more dangerous
adventures of this sort elsewhere, notably in the Caucasus.
Finally, I have no confidence that the Clinton Administration is
ready to take the rational way out offered by Rep. Weldon and his
colleagues. Indeed, rational people would not have committed the blunders
to date nor would they have continued to compound them. All signs indicate that President Clinton, Secretary
Albright, and their "Third Wave" European cronies of the Tony Blair stripe
are treating this not as a policy problem but as a political
problem.
Their attitude, as it was during the impeachment crisis, is "we'll
just have to win then, won't we" -- "winning" meaning not a successful
policy or even winning the war, but winning the propaganda war: an
exercise in media spin, polls, and focus groups.
As Madeleine Albright suggested last year, the leader of some countries she
mentioned, Serbia among them . . . try to grab the truth and leash it like
a dog, ration it like bread, or mold it like clay. Their goal is to create
their own myths, conceal their own blunders, direct resentments elsewhere
and instill in their people a dread of change.
However true that description is of Slobodan
Milosevic, Madame Secretary should look in the
mirror.
No, this war is not about American interests
but about vindicating the intelligence of Madeleine Albright and the good
word of Bill Clinton. The door to an
honorable exit is clearly marked. The question is how to induce this
Administration to take it.
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