The Times,
London, March 11, 1998
by Simon Jenkins
The Foreign Secretary's imperialist
recipe may make the Balkan cauldron boil over
Kosovo: Too Many Cooks
As IRA mortars were being moved into firing
position round Armagh police station on Monday, the mind of the British
Foreign Secretary was far away. Under the gilt and stucco ceiling of Lancaster
House in London, Robin Cook was "demanding"
that the Serb-led Yugoslav Government get its guns out of a Balkan mountain
province called Kosovo. As he toyed with his canapés,
he sampled an economic sanction or two. He sipped an arms embargo and practised
to himself a "disgraceful" and a "wholly unacceptable".
He then declared that "we cannot support the violent repression of
the non-violent expression of political views". It sounded good. The
cameras whirred. As he and his Contact Group partners later settled into
their limousines, they must have wondered why their other politicians find
domestic policy so hard. Foreign policy is a doddle.
The British Government's
Kosovo policy is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Does new
Labour demand full autonomy for Kosovo, or regional devolution, or partial
self-government, or just the withdrawal of undisciplined army units?
Is the might of the British State being marshalled behind the militant
Jashari clan of Drenica or the moderates under Ibrahim Rugova? Where does
it stand on the single transferable vote for the Pristina assembly? The
value of using economic sanctions against the Serb leader, Slobodan Milosevic,
is even more opaque. Mr Cook wanted on Monday to stop subsidising Belgrade's
privatisation programme, since it merely enriches Mr Milosevic's friends.
If that is the case, why are British taxpayers subsidising it at all?
Mr Cook's
American opposite number, Madeleine Albright, was scarcely more explicit.
She indicated on Monday that the United Nations charter
respecting the internal sovereignty of states is no longer recognised by
America. Belgrade's handling
of dissent was "an affront to the universal standards of human
rights we are pledged
to uphold". To Mr Cook, his "shock, dismay and
concern" was reason enough for "demanding" of Mr Milosevic
a policy shift, as yet unspecified.
Mr Cook's interventionism does not respect
a government's legitimacy. Mr Milosevic may be corrupt, a thug and a nationalist
bully, but he is a constitutional ruler who won a sort-of contested election
and half-tolerates opposition parties. He appears to have the support of
most Serbs. But having once entered Washington demonology, he might as
well be President Saddam Hussein. He is simply bad. The chief thing he
and Saddam have in common is that they are rendered near impregnable by
the ineptitude of British and American diplomacy.
The politics of sub-national separatism
have always been fiendish. Britain of all countries should know that. When
the rod of communism was lifted from Central and Eastern Europe, disparate
groups were bound to seek autonomy, and central governments bound to stop
them. So it has proved. I carry no brief for Mr Milosevic or his methods
of suppressing the Kosovo Liberation Army and its clans in their villages
at the weekend. The methods seem par for the Balkans over the past decade,
indeed the past millennium. But what business is this of ours?
When Yugoslavia began to break up, most
foreign nations sent humanitarian relief. This honoured the traditional
obligation of charity the world over. Yet the British Government could
not stop there. It was and is still in imperial mode, albeit under the
wing of the US State Department. No party, creed nor incident is too distant
for ministers not to have "a view". Britain opposed Bosnian separatism,
then supported it. Britain opposed the Bosnian Serb republic, but now appears
to have accepted it. This week Mr Cook appeared to support a Kosovan republic,
or at least to oppose Mr Milosevic's efforts to forestall one. But then
he . . . er . . . does not want the further fragmentation of the Balkans.
That is an A-level question and he is still at GCSE.
Of course Mr Cook
and Ms Albright will assert that it is not the politics that worries them,
but the violence. The Jashari clan, whose
surviving members may yet enjoy cult status at Washington dinners, should
presumably not have been killed outright but brought into talks about talks.
Yet America has no compunction about killing civilians to
achieve political goals, as the citizens of Lebanon, Somalia, Panama and
Iraq know to their cost.
Neither
Mr Cook nor Ms Albright believe in lecturing the world without a gun in
their pockets. Thus Ms Albright said she would not "rule out"
the "severest consequences" if the Serbs fail to reach the unspecified
political settlement. "Severest
consequences" is the new euphemism for bombing. The
phrase is beloved not just of Mr Cook and Ms Albright but of Tony Blair,
Kofi Annan, Bill Clinton, even the new UN Human Rights Commissioner, Mary
Robinson. Since bombing sounds indelicate on sophisticated lips, some other
word must be found. "Severest consequences"
is ethical diplomacy's version of the Cold War's "terminate with extreme
prejudice", one more sanitisation of authorised violence.
Lancaster House on Monday saw a monumental
hypocrisy. It may be no more than historical coincidence
that this month America finally honoured two soldiers who tried to stop
colleagues massacring 109 civilians at My Lai during the Vietnam War, to
raise their "body count". Anyone who thought the habit had died
will remember the helicopter gunship that "hosed" a marketplace
crowd during the recent American occupation of Somalia. Meanwhile, a British
Government has at last ordered an inquiry into the 1972 Bloody Sunday massacre,
when paratroops shot 13 men during a civil rights march in Northern Ireland.
Such atrocities occur even in the best ordered democracies. They are not
excusable, merely ubiquitous when politics collapses into rule by the gun.
A report from Kosovo yesterday said the Albanians were so oppressed that
the Serb police had to patrol in flak-jackets. Who last visited Belfast?
Had Yugoslavia, indeed had anyone, "demanded
reforms" and sent a "mediator" to Northern Ireland after
Bloody Sunday, the British Government would have thought it an intolerable
impertinence. Yet then and since, British politicians and officials have
argued privately for killing IRA leaders and interning their families.
American operations in Latin America in the 1980s were as much an "affront
to universal standards of human rights" as those of Mr Milosevic.
No nation's hands are so pure it can, in Dickens's phrase, tot up the world's
ills on a slate and dry its tears with a rag.
We are told everything has changed since
the Cold War. The great powers have been liberated from self-defence to
"do good". In Ms Albright's words, they have pledged themselves
to defend human rights wherever they are threatened. For civis Britannicus
sum read civis orbis sum. Dial 999, cry help and jets will scream to your
aid, so long as safe passage is guaranteed to news media. (Tough luck Azerbaijan,
Afghanistan, Tibet and Timor: no Lancaster House histrionics in your cause.)
This
is boutique foreign policy at its worst. It offers every separatist the
hope of a lottery jackpot, sponsorship by the world's most powerful nations.
It is a cruel hope. It was offered to the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina
in their attempt to set up a state to defy Serbia. Thirty thousand British
and other Nato troops are now trapped indefinitely into policing a partition
that would be more secure had it been left to police itself, like that
between Serbia and Croatia. Now Mr
Cook and Ms Albright are blatantly hinting that, provided the Albanians
of Kosovo kick up a sufficiently photogenic stink, they too may win autonomy
from Serbia under the protection of Nato guns. What else
is meant by imposing sanctions "to send a message to Milosevic"?
What else is meant by "severest consequences or else"?
The only way to stop Serbia doing as it
chooses in Kosovo is to invade it. All else is hot air. You do not bluff
Slobodan Milosevic. I find it hard to believe that the British Cabinet
seriously intends to garrison Kosovo against a Serbian army. This
would imply the enforced dismembering of a sovereign, European state.
But why else rattle sabres? Is that all there is to the Government's Kosovo
policy: playing tease with foreigners?
Meanwhile, back in Armagh . . .
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