Making War to Keep Peace (39 page)

When the NATO governments finally decided the time had come to use force against Serbia, the United States and NATO agreed to assist Kosovo, as they had finally provided arms and assistance to Croatia and Bosnia, enabling them to defend themselves against MiloÅ¡ević. There was still resistance to the idea of sending U.S. forces to Kosovo to help protect the Kosovars; some argued that such an action was contrary to the will of Yugoslavia, the nation of which Kosovo was a part, and that to send troops into a province in a sovereign state would constitute an invasion. But at Rambouillet the Contact Group had announced that such an action might not be considered an invasion if its purpose was to protect Kosovar civilians from Serb armies. Whether such an action amounts to an intervention, or “coercive peacekeeping,” it was nothing new: the Bush and Clinton administrations had undertaken much the same kind of action—without the consent of the nations in question—in Somalia and Haiti.

By now it was clear that Milošević could not be controlled by diplomatic means. He had ignored his October 1998 cease-fire agreement with NATO, boycotted Rambouillet, and ignored the resulting accords signed by the Kosovars. By 1999, Milošević's nationalist campaign had long since been transformed into a shocking reign of terror directed at Kosovar civilians, including children.

President Clinton's goals for Kosovo were humanitarian. They included the return of refugees—the goal of all interventions in which unarmed civilians are driven from their homes. Clinton's team had tried to negotiate a settlement and a cease-fire and identify a space for peacekeeping.
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NATO's war in Kosovo came three years after the signing of the Dayton Accords and after nearly a year of unfettered Serb violence against the Kosovar Albanians. By the time NATO bombs started falling on Serbia, nearly 90 percent of the Kosovar Albanians had been displaced.

Before NATO could go to war, approval was required under the U.S. Constitution from the U.S. Congress. Congress was deeply divided on Kosovo, both between and within the parties. But the situation on the ground was rapidly deteriorating; Kosovars fleeing to Albania were being
killed en route by Serb irregulars. Finally, on March 23, 1999, the Senate voted to approve the NATO bombing. (The House, however, refused to do so when it voted one month later.)

Many analysts have characterized the inability of the United States and the European countries to prevent Milošević's violence as a failure of diplomacy. I disagree. What these analysts fail to understand was that the problem was not a diplomatic one. The problem was Slobodan Milošević himself—a power-hungry dictator who responded not to diplomatic commitments but only to force, a man whose main goal was to fashion, at any cost, an ethnically pure Kosovo inhabited only by Serbs.

Despite their lengthy experience with Milošević in Bosnia, where cease-fires had been repeatedly ignored, the Europeans and Americans took a remarkably long time to realize that Milošević would never willingly negotiate a solution to the Kosovo dispute. The Europeans' faith in dialogue, and their aversion to force, made them especially ineffective in dealing with Milošević. Ultimately, the destruction and mass murder in Kosovo were stopped only by the application of American force and NATO airpower. And this came to pass only because key officials in the Clinton administration—especially General Clark, Secretary Albright, and Clinton himself—grasped that diplomacy had to be backed by force in dealing with such a bloodthirsty dictator.

Force and More Force

In March 1999, for the first time in its fifty-year history, NATO went to war. The purpose of the action was not to defeat the Serbs, to conquer the Yugoslav armed forces, to cause a regime change, or to win independence for Kosovo. Rather, it aimed to persuade Milošević to stop the violence.

On March 24, NATO aircraft started the bombing campaign against Yugoslavia.
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General Clark's first priority was to incapacitate the Serb air defense and military communication systems. NATO used precision bombs that targeted the Serbian military and avoided civilian targets. After four weeks of bombing, however, Milošević remained defiant. In fact, he decided to speed up the killing and expulsion of ethnic Albanians. According to Human Rights Watch, between the beginning of the NATO air raids and their cessation in June 1999, the Serbs undertook a
“systematic campaign to terrorize, kill, and expel the ethnic Albanians,” an initiative “organized by the highest levels of the Serbian and Yugoslav governments.”
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On March 25, the day after NATO strikes began, Serb forces burned two hundred to six hundred homes in the town of Djakovica.
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During the NATO air campaign, approximately 863,000 sought refuge outside Kosovo. An additional 590,000 were internally displaced. Altogether, over 90 percent of the Kosovar Albanian population was displaced.
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The
Washington Post
called the Serbian action “the most ambitiously ruthless military campaign in Europe in half a century.”
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On April 3, the Serbian people showed their support of Milošević and their defiance of the West by holding a rock concert in Belgrade.
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Within a month, however, the economic effects of the war began to be felt, though most people still did not have to go far for electricity or water.

The turning point came when the daily lives of the Serbian people were seriously affected. On March 27, day four of the air strike campaign, the second stage of the air war began. Now, in addition to bridges and highways, NATO began bombing Serbia's military-industrial infrastructure, its electricity plants, and its oil pipelines and refineries, thereby destroying the Serbian economy. According to the Independent International Commission on Kosovo, NATO knocked out 70 percent of Serbia's electricity production capacity and 80 percent of its oil refinery capacity. By the end of May, there were “increasing signs that Belgrade is feeling the heat,” according to State Department spokesman James Rubin.
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The morale of the people began to crumble, and antiwar demonstrations and protests replaced pro-war rock concerts throughout Serbia. In the Serbian towns of Cacak and Krusevac, protesters reportedly shouted, “The dead do not need Kosovo!”
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Between five hundred and a thousand Serb soldiers deserted in Kosovo.
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NATO threatened to use ground troops if MiloÅ¡ević did not surrender. After Russian prime minister Victor Chernomyrdin held an unsuccessful meeting with MiloÅ¡ević in Belgrade on April 24, the NATO allies and the U.S. administration began seriously considering the use of ground troops. Britain's chief of defense, General Charles Guthrie, threatened that Yugoslavia's “war machine is going to be weakened, again, day after day, week after week…. And we will be able to choose our time” for entering with ground troops.
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The increasing unpopularity
of the war at home, the inability of the Serb government to control its military forces, and NATO's threat of broadening its campaign convinced Milošević that his chances of retaining power would be greater if he gave in to NATO's demands and ended the war.

Turning Points

Before the first bomb was dropped on March 24, Serb military forces and paramilitary gangs had swarmed into Kosovo's capital, Pristina, and the surrounding cities, driving Kosovars out of their homes; burning houses, stores, factories, and restaurants; raping, beating, and killing. Once the bombing started, foreign journalists, especially Americans, were subjected to hostile treatment—shoved, slapped, threatened, arrested, interrogated, and expelled, their cameras and other equipment smashed.

After the foreign observers and journalists were driven out, it became harder to get detailed information about events inside Kosovo. As the war progressed, however, it became clear that the Serbs had launched a full-scale ethnic cleansing campaign, moving from village to village; torching houses; seizing and sometimes executing Albanian teachers, journalists, and political leaders; and beginning the ominous separating out of boys and men that had preceded the massacres in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. It is said that this deadly work was carried out by the followers of the war criminal Arkan, among the most brutal ethnic cleansers in Croatia and Bosnia.

Because the myth of “NATO aggression” was already being circulated by MiloÅ¡ević apologists, it is important to remember that the buildup of Serb forces was already taking place before NATO reluctantly started bombing. MiloÅ¡ević's intentions were clear: to use his growing forces to drive the 1.8 million Albanians (Muslims) out of Kosovo before war even began. He had already driven 400,000 of them from their homes, destroyed more than 500 villages and 22,000 houses, and killed more than 2,000 persons. One of the original objectives of the air war—protecting Albanians from Serb aggression—proved unattainable. Wave after wave of refugees arrived daily in neighboring countries, with fresh tales of abuses and killing by Serb forces. Eventually, General Clark acknowledged that bombing could not stop the harsh mistreatment of the victims.

Not every aspect of the NATO campaign was an immediate success. In early June, when NATO offered the Kosovo rebels their first NATO air support, in an unsuccessful bid to break a Serbian siege along the Albanian border and to show the Serbs (and perhaps themselves) that they were able to fight, the experience showed that the Serb military remained a military force of considerable strength. U.S. secretary of defense William Cohen commented that the Serbs had not yet surrendered. “At this point, not one single Serb soldier has withdrawn from Kosovo,”
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he conceded. NATO forces had not definitively defeated the Serbs, and American pilots were still flying B2 bombers on thirty-hour missions from Missouri to Kosovo.

Yet by this time the die, after nearly three months of bombing, was cast. After several discussions between Milošević and the Russian envoy Victor Chernomyrdin, U.S. deputy secretary of state Strobe Talbott met with the Russians in Rome to discuss how to end the war. Many of the outstanding issues were resolved in talks among Chernomyrdin, Clinton, and Vice President Al Gore. They planned the withdrawal of Serb troops and an occupation with NATO in the central role. At the Group of Eight (G-8) meeting in Cologne in June, Russia ended its opposition to the UN peace plan, and the principles of the settlement were adopted at the G-8 meeting on June 2. The proposal required the following:

• Immediate and verifiable end to violence and repression in Kosovo
  
• Demilitarization of the KLA forces
  
• Withdrawal from Kosovo of Serb military, police, and paramilitary forces with a phased detailed timetable and a buffer zone behind which Serb troops were to withdraw
  
• Deployment of an international civil and security presence that would include NATO forces under the auspices of the UN
  
• Establishment of an interim administration in Kosovo, to be determined by the UN Security Council
  
• Safe return of all refugees and displaced persons
  
• Access for humanitarian organizations
  
• Establishment of a political process aimed at substantial self-government for Kosovo
  
• Comprehensive approach to the economic development and stabilization of the crisis
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Although Russian foreign minister Ivanov said that his country's participation in peacekeeping was not certain, all the G-8 countries signed the agreement.

Three days before the war ended, after eleven weeks of air strikes, the Serbs finally withdrew from the Kosovar village of Kacanik, stripping it as they left. KLA soldiers welcomed the NATO forces. They quickly found a mass grave containing the bodies of twenty-eight men, and several areas that had been sacked and burned by forces led by Serbia's justice minister, General Dragoljub Jancovic.

On June 3, Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari, Talbott, and Chernomyrdin went to Serbia to present the peace plan to Milošević. It was a take-it-or-leave-it proposal. If Milošević left the meeting without agreeing to the proposal, they told him, NATO's pounding of Yugoslavia would continue, and the terms of any future agreement would be worse.
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They also presented Milošević with a military technical agreement that detailed the phased pullout of Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) forces in twelve days.
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According to the technical agreement, the withdrawal of the Serbian military from sections of Kosovo would be synchronized with the entry of the Kosovo Force (KFOR). With no other option, Milošević agreed; the Serb parliament formally approved the peace plan the same day. The use of force had prevailed.

The NATO bombing would continue until three conditions were satisfied in the following twenty-four hours:

1. The Serbs had to begin their withdrawal from Kosovo;
   
2. NATO would then begin a twenty-four-hour pause in the bombing; and
   
3. The Security Council had to pass a resolution endorsing the deal.
   

On June 10, 1999, Serbian troops began pulling out of Kosovo. British general Mike Jackson notified NATO secretary-general Javier Solana that the pullout had begun, and Solana directed Clark to call off the air strikes. President Clinton was on the telephone with Tony Blair when Javier Solana called to inform him that the Serbs were moving out of Pristina and Kosovo. MiloÅ¡ević claimed a victory for the “best army in the world,”
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declaring, “We never gave up Kosovo.” The Albanians waited for the Serbs to leave. An estimated 840,000 refugees began to filter back into Kosovo.
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After the Serbs' withdrawal, the United States, the United Kingdom, and NATO devised a partition of Serbia. Within four days of the end of the war, the Russians unexpectedly rolled into Pristina, throwing the delicate plans and timetable into disorder. Serb women rushed forward to embrace the Russians, who saw their success in arriving first in the capital of Kosovo as a great victory. Russia's foreign minister, Igor Ivanov, called the early arrival “an unfortunate mistake,” and NATO generals feared that their Russian counterparts might have ordered the advance without the approval of the Russian civilian leadership.