A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (75 page)

Supporters of the NATO mission thought that the U.S. determination to avoid casualties might well doom the operation. On April 8, 1999, Holly Burkhalter, then with Physicians for Human Rights, read an opinion essay on National Public Radio in which she urged President Clinton to deploy ground troops to stop what she feared was genocide. "Milosevic and his forces are clearly destroying at least a part of this ethnic group by forcibly driving almost half of its population out of Kosovo, by targeted killings of community leaders, by the execution of Kosovar men, and boys, and the whole-scale demolition of homes, villages, and cultural and religious sites," Burkhalter said. "If President Clinton avoids taking the painful action necessary to expel Serb forces from Kosovo, he will be remembered as the President on whose watch three genocides unfolded."

Burkhalter and other progressive critics were joined by conservative voices that argued, in effect,"Now that we're in, let's win." Soon after the operation began, Henry Kissinger wrote in Newsweek, "NATO cannot survive if it now abandons the campaign without achieving its objective of ending the massacres. The following month he lamented the "generation gap" that was undermining the campaign. "The formative experiences of the Clinton administration's key personnel were either in the trenches of the Vietnam protest movement or in presidential campaigns-or both," Kissinger wrote. "Suspicious of the role of power in foreign policy, they use it ineffectively and without convi:tion " =' Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican, declared, "What shall we do now? Win, by all means necessary."

Gradually, as senior American and European policymakers began to sense that defeat was a distinct possibility, NATO intensified its attacks and did begin playing to win. Instead of crumbling, as many feared it would do under strain, the heterogeneous alliance strengthened its resolve. In phase one NATO jets had struck Serb antiaircraft defenses and command bunkers. On March 29, 1999, NATO entered phase two, increasing the number of planes from 400 to 1,000 and broadening its list of targets to include Yugoslavia's infrastructure below the forty-fourth parallel, far south of Belgrade. On April 3, day eleven of the war, NATO moved into phase three, which permitted attacks on targets in Belgrade. In early April NATO announced it would send to Albania the 5,000-nian Task Force Hawk, including twenty-four Apache helicopters. This was one gesture designed to hint that a NATO ground invasion might follow. President Clinton and his cabinet were still ruling out deploying U.S. ground troops, but Clark did his best with head fakes and feints to lure Milosevic into believing that a ground war was still a distant threat. Although Washington had finally agreed to send Clark the Apaches, the same kind of Pentagon foot-dragging that had delayed the dispatch of U.S. APCs during the Rwanda genocide postponed the delivery of the helicopters until late April. And despite Clark's endless badgering, he never received White House permission to use them.

The more determined the allies became, the more they took the war to the Serbian people. On April 23, at the NATO summit, NATO leaders agreed to target the personal property and businesses of Milosevic and his closest associates and to strike targets that would affect millions of civilians by disrupting transportation, water, and electricity. Some forty days into the war, on May 3, 1999, NATO planes began dropping individually parachut ed dispensers the size of tennis-ball cans, or "rubber duckies," onto Yugoslav power grids, where they released spools of carbon graphite thread and caused instant power outages.2' NATO's attacks on civilian infrastructure turned the war into what Veton Surroi, the editor of Kohn Ditore, calls the "espresso machine war." "The Serbs would only quit when the war affected Milosevic and his cronies at home personally," Surroi says, "when the shortage of electricity meant they couldn't get their daily espresso."

Because the operation was a "humanitarian intervention," NATO planners were especially sensitive about avoiding violations of international humanitarian law. The Geneva conventions prohibited the bombing of dual civilian-military sites if the "incidental loss of civilian life ... would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage" of the strike. American and European lawyers had almost as much to say about the conduct of the operation as their political superiors. Lawyers from the Pentagon's Judge Advocate General's Office tested each potential target against the laws of war, which greatly restricted what ended up on Clark's target list.

Kosovo Albanians in flight.

Despite NATO's incremental approach, the intense legal scrutiny, and the unprecedented precision of the new weaponry, some missiles strayed, and even those that stayed on target provoked controversy. NATO jets struck an Albanian refugee column, a Serb passenger train, and other civilian convoys. Perhaps most notorious, on May 7, 1999, relying on an old map, U.S. B-2 bombers hit the Chinese embassy, killing three Chinese citizens and injuring at least twenty others. General Clark received a deluge of mocking faxes to his European command headquarters. "Dear Gen. Clark," the faxes began, "We've moved. Our new address is "29 In targeting dual-use infrastructure in Serbia proper, NATO bombers hit bridges, power plants, communication facilities, television stations, and political party headquarters. The attacks were justified as essential to disrupting Serbian command and control, but critics complained that the same missile that took out the Yugoslav Third Army's generator also shut down the neighborhood hospital. The same bomb that robbed Milosevic of the satellite he needed to broadcast nightly lies on television also deprived Serbian civilians of the right to view the news. NATO's desire to avoid risks to its pilots appeared to increase the civilian toll of war."'

Victory?

On May 24, 1999, two months into NATO's campaign, the UN war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, which had been set up originally to respond to atrocities committed in Croatia and Bosnia, indicted Serbian President Siobodan Milosevic for crimes against humanity and war crimes committed in the previous two months in Kosovo. It was the first time a head of state had been charged during an armed conflict with violations of international law. Already there were few signs the Serbs would throw in the towel, and many in the Clinton administration feared that the indictment would make Milosevic even more defiant and prone to cling to power. According to UN Chief Prosecutor Louise Arbour, senior U.S. officials attempted to block the indictment.

Afraid that NATO might lose its first war, British prime minister Tony Blair began lobbying President Clinton to prepare for a ground invasion. U.S. officials grudgingly began mumbling that they had not taken any option "off the table." General Clark was finally instructed to develop a preliminary plan. Known as the "Wes plan," it called for an attack into a hostile environment from the south by 175,000 NATO troops. Neither the Joint Chiefs nor Defense Secretary Cohen liked the plan, and they communicated their unease to President Clinton. Still, on June 2, 1999, National Security Adviser Sandy Berger met with several Washington foreign policy insiders and made four points. Point one was, "We're going to win" Point four was, "All options are on the table." When he was asked whether that included U.S. ground troops, Berger said, "Go back to point one."31

Back in Serbia, dissent was growing. Serb units began to mutiny and to desert. They did not want to die for Kosovo, and they certainly did not want to die for Milosevic. Milosevic's cronies began pressing him to protect their business interests, even if that meant abandoning Kosovo. And Russian president Boris Yeltsin, whom Milosevic trusted for support, dispatched his envoy, former Russian prime minister Viktor Cher nonryrdin, with the instruction: "I don't care what you have to do, just end it. It's ruining everything."32 Yeltsin privileged ties with the West over any overro- manticized Serb-Russian brotherhood. Suddenly, Milosevic faced pressure from disgruntled soldiers, their families, his own associates, and Russia. He was also afraid that if NATO indeed staged a ground invasion, he would be arrested for war crimes.

On June 3, 1999, Milosevic surrendered. On June 9, after seventy-eight days of bombing, the Serbian dictator signed an agreement that forced Serbian troops and police to leave Kosovo and permitted 50,000 NATO peacekeepers to enter it. Although Kosovo would officially remain part of Serbia, with Serbian forces gone, Albanians would finally be able to govern themselves. More than I million ethnic Albanians returned to what was left of their homes and slowly began rebuilding their lives, assured for perhaps the first time that they were no longer vulnerable to Belgrade's whims. After 34,000 sorties, only two NATO planes had been shot down. No U.S. or allied forces had been killed. General Clark had managed to overcome White House fear of casualties, Pentagon hostility toward him and his mission, discord among NATO allies, and a severely restricted target list. The man attacked for his strategic judgment and his political instincts won NATO's first war.

In the summer of 1999, just after NATO troops were deployed to aid the transition to autonomy, I toured Kosovo and met a fourteen-year-old Albanian girl with the fair-skinned features of Sidbela Zimic of Sarajevo. Her name was Drita Hyseyni, and she had just survived a massacre in which her parents, grandparents, and brothers had all been killed before her eyes. Although Drita herself absorbed five bullets in the mass execution, she managed to escape the crime scene, dragging her own bloodied body, as well as that of her younger sister, out of the house that the Serb paramilitaries had just set aflame.

Listening to Dri:a's gruesome story, I was tempted to view her experience as a consequence of NATO bombing. After all, as bad as life was for Albanians under Serb rule before the intervention, it had not come to this. The Serbs had killed some 3,000 Albanians before NATO intervened, but they had left the majority of Albanians alone in their homes. To the naked eye, it seemed that NATO had intervened to fix a leaky faucet but had ended up flooding the house. Drita remembered the taunt of the gunmen as they mowed down her mother and father: "Where's NATO now, shiptar?" they chanted, as they unloaded their machine guns into the wilting Hyseyni clan. "Bill Clinton can't save you""

But Drita had a different view. Her scarred face lit up when she recalled the moment she first heard NATO planes overhead. "I knew then, with NATO in the air, we would win," she said. "And we did." Hard as it was to see Kosovo as victorious when the price had been entire families, the Kosovo Albanian survivors treated these sacrifices as the price of freedom. "You must understand," she said firmly, "we were going to be killed anyway. It was only a matter of time. We knew it was better to die with a fight. NATO fought and now we, at least, are free"

Aftermath

The Critiques

A victorious President Clinton traveled to Kosovo in the aftermath of the Serbs' surrender. He spoke with a group of Albanians gathered in a sports pavilion near the main American base in southern Kosovo and summed up the NATO triumph: "Mr. Milosevic wanted to keep control of Kosovo by getting rid of all of you, and we said,'no."'The Albanians jammed into the stadium cheered wildly, chanting "Clin-ton! Clin-ton!"The president continued, "Now he has lost his grip on Kosovo and you have returned. No more days hiding in cellars, no more nights freezing in mountains and forests""

The verdict on whether the NATO war was a success and whether such humanitarian interventions should be repeated is mixed at best. Assessments have varied depending on who has been asked and when. Clinton administration officials defended both the execution and the effects of NATO's seventy-eight-day bombing campaign, but many others were unpersuaded. Throughout the twentieth century, U.S. officials had frequently argued against intervening to stop genocide, citing futility, perversity, or jeopardy. And when the United States finally intervened in Kosovo to curb Serbia's human rights abuses against Albanians, critics outside the U.S. government made these same arguments. When the United States and its NATO allies finally intervened to prevent genocide, support proved thin. Many bystanders argued that the form the intervention took and the atrocities it provoked confirmed the reasons they had long cited for looking away.

Perversity

The first line of criticism of the NATO operation was that whatever its aspirations to restore NATO credibility and to aid the Kosovo Albanians, Operation Allied Force had actually yielded perverse results. It had damaged NATO and caused the Albanians more suffering. Conservative critics found fault with the premise of using precious U.S. military resources to rescue distant foreigners. They said "social work" should not be NATO's business. The Serbs had symbolically humiliated the Western powers by hanging on so long, and NATO "readiness" had been practically undermined by the expenditure of so many ballistic resources in a country of no vital import.

Progressive critics charged that the United States had revealed the shallowness of its humanitarian commitments by choosing to fly at 15,000 feet. Political theorist Michael Walzer was one who wrote that there was a moral contradiction between NATO's willingness to kill Serb soldiers and inflict collateral damage and its unwillingness to send American soldiers to battle. "This is not a possible moral position," he argued. "You can't kill unless you are prepared to die."35 Those who questioned the sincerity of NATO's humanitarian aims began looking for ulterior motives. Some argued that the mission had been launched in order to justify a continued role for the U.S. military so as to keep military bases afloat in the United States and to keep Boeing booming. Fringe elements that had not spent much time in the Balkans insisted that NATO was trying to secure yet more markets for .American companies or to stuff capitalism down the throats of socialist stalwarts. "The truth is that neither Clinton nor Blair gives a damn about the Kosovar Albanians," said British leftist playwright Harold Pinter. "This action has been yet another blatant and brutal assertion of U.S. power using NATO as its missile. It sets out to consolidate one thing-American domination of Europe.""' Since the intervention took place in the immediate aftermath of Clinton's impeachment scandal, many chuckled that this was the president's way of "wagging the dog," or, in Henry IV's words, busying "giddy minds with foreign quarrels."" Others shrugged and muttered that no matter what the deeper reasons for American involvement, if this was what humanitarian intervention looked like, they wanted no part of it. They concluded that their earlier mistrust of governments was warranted. When the objectives were humanitarian, states would devote only miserly means.