A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (76 page)

In February 20CO Human Rights Watch, an organization that had fractured over whether to call for military force during the Bosnian war, issued a report that was highly critical of NATO's intervention in Kosovo. On the basis of interviews, press reports, a three-week field mission to Serbia in August 1999, and r.he scrutiny of bomb damage assessments and autopsy reports, the group concluded that some 500 Serbian and Albanian civilians had been killed during NATO's Kosovo operation. One-third of the incidents and more than half of the deaths resulted from attacks on questionable targets such as Serbian radio and television headquarters. The group recommended restrictions on daylight attacks, prohibitions on the use of cluster bombs in populated areas, greater care in attacking mobile targets, and more scrupulous target selection."

The same month the American Association of jurists and a group of Western and Russian law experts submitted a special report to the UN war crimes tribunal at The Hague claiming the NATO bombing campaign violated international law by recklessly killing civilians. Although the UN court's prosecution office eventually dismissed the charges, it did conduct a preliminary investigation that made NATO officers nervous about future humanitarian interventions and about the danger posed by international courts.This was precisely the kind of foreign scrutiny of U.S. military activity that U.S. Senate opponents of ratification of the genocide convention had hoped to avoid.

NATO Secretary-General George Robertson issued a statement in response to the Human Rights Watch report in which he credited NATO's "extraordinary efforts" to avoid civilian deaths but acknowledged that casualties had regrettably occurred. He urged observers to be careful not to draw false equivalency. "I regret that NATO's action caused even a single civilian death, but these unintended incidents in no way compare to the systematic, unspeakable violence inflicted on civilians by Milosevic's troops and paramilitary forces," Robertson said." In the minds of many skeptics, however, the two sets of violations merged together.

Futility

A second criticism of the intervention was that the violence committed by Albanians in the aftermath of NATO's victory only confirmed there were "no good guys." The alleged symmetry of the parties was said to confirm the futility of trying to do a net service to humanity. For a decade prior to NATO's March 1999 intervention, the Kosovo Albanians had been fired from their jobs, strip-searched, barred from schools, and generally spat upon by armed and unarmed Serbs alike. Just ahead of, and during, the NATO bombing campaign, Albanians watched summary executions, beatings, rapes, and the torching of hundreds of towns. Ninety percent of the Kosovo populace was forcibly displaced from their homes during Serbia's Operation Horseshoe. Yet when Milosevic surrendered, many idealistic foreigners had fully expected that the Albanians would return home, turn the other cheek, and behave responsibly. As Surroi of Koha Ditore explained, "Morality was your investment here, so you expect morality as your payback""'

But when NATO helped bring about a role reversal and empowered Albanians to realize their rights and control their own destinies, many Albanian returnees behaved brutally. In the year after the NATO victory, while some 50,000 NATO troops patrolled Kosovo, Albanian extremists expelled more than 100,000 Serbs from their homes in Kosovo and killed some 1,500. Prominent Albanian media outlets published the names of those they called Serb "war criminals." Those branded were often gunned down. The Albanian authorities, usually KLA officers who had simply left their uniforms (but rarely their guns) at home, looked away from, actively encouraged, or took part in looting, beatings, and murders. The actual number of Albanian perpetrators of violent acts was quite small, but the general mood among Albanians amounted to "serves them right after what they did." Serbs were at last getting their comeuppance. Collective guilt of the sort that Lemkin and others attributed to the German people during the Holocaust was all the rage. Those Serbs who remained in Kosovo ended up mostly clustered in the northern part of the province in a kind of militant ethnic ghetto.

At the same speech in November 1999 where President Clinton drew hearty applause from Albanians for his proclamations about the NATO victory, he broached the tricky subject of Albanian coexistence with Serbs. "You can never forget the injustice that was done to you," he said, as the Albanians clapped with delight."No one can force you to forgive what was done to you," Clinton continued, again earning thundering acclaim. "But you must try," he concluded, drawing only a sullen silence from the raucous crowd.

History does not offer many examples of the victims of mass violence taking power from their former oppressors, in large measure because outside powers like the United States have been so loathe to intervene on behalf of targeted minorities. Unless another country acts for selfinterested reasons, as was the case when Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1979, or armed members of the victim group manage to fight back and win, as Tutsi rebels did in Rwanda in 1994, the perpetrators of genocide have usually retained power. Yet the fact that victims have rarely taken over from victimizers has not stopped U.S. policyniakers from justifying inaction by claiming an equivalence among all parties to the conflict. "We can't make these people like one another," they said. Although "all sides" rarely acted the same when these statements were made, U.S. government officials frequently cautioned that if the victims (Kurd,Tutsi, or Bosnian Muslim) had acquired the capacity and the power, they, too, would turn against those belonging to the perpetrator group. The logic of these claims was that no matter how attractive the prospect of rescue might seem in the short term, it would make no difference in the long term. The people the United States saved and empowered today would sooner or later torment those they had dislodged. Thus, as we have seen, those who believed in the futility of intervention asked, in effect, "Why bother?"

This futility justification for nonintervention is historically untestable. Holocaust survivor Primo Levi addressed this tendency to equate the perpetrator's behavior and the victim's capacity in The Drowned and the Saved:

I do not know, and it does not much interest me to know, whether in my depths there lurks a murderer, but I do know that I was a guiltless victim and I was not a murderer. I know that the murderers existed ... and that to confuse them with their victims is a moral disease of an aesthetic affectation or a sinister sign of complicity; above all, it is a precious service rendered (intentionally or not) to the negators of truth."

Levi did not deny that victims could commit evil acts. He conceded that the tendency to be vengeful in the aftermath of terrible suffering was very real-and very understandable. But Levi questioned the assumption that such retribution was inevitable. He also doubted the possibility of equivalence after genocide.

It is somewhat ironic that it was Kosovo that ended up eliciting the first American anti-atrocity intervention of the century. It may have been the least likely, of all the potentially enforceable "peaces," to breed reconciliation. Indeed, there was no original conciliation to redo. Albanians and Serbs had cohabitated in the province for generations, but unlike in Bosnia and Rwanda, where an ethnic map once showed intermingled blots and colors reminiscent of a Jackson Pollock painting, the two groups in Kosovo had rarely mixed. Intermarriage was virtually unheard of. This history did not mean that Albanians and Serbs could not live side by side; it just meant that they were unlikely to do so for some time.

But international agencies and Western governments and publics wanted quick, cheap results. After Serbia's surrender, the United Nations set up a civil administration in which foreigners decided local tax rates, television news content, school curriculum, and jail sentences. But police were the most crucial ingredient in a province where the legal system had vanished with the overnight departure of Serbian officialdom. UN police were deployed at a snail's pace, and donors proved parsimonious. German General Klaus Reinhardt, the commander of the NATO-led Kosovo force, noted that the UN budget for Kosovo for the first year was $64 million, "a quarter of that which NATO spent in one day of the bombing.."'z

Thousands of foreign aid workers, who became known as "humanitarian imperialists," set up shop in Kosovo. But they lacked the resources and the ideological coinforr level to dictate the pace and parameters of Kosovo's development. Instead, they tried to leverage their resources to influence local political decisions and to use their money to build local capacity. Because the locals did not yet fully control their own destiny-Kosovo Albanians were left with "substantial autonomy and self-government" but not independence--the people frequently blamed the outsiders for woes of their own making. Nonetheless, after two years of transitional UN rule, when Kosovo Albanian voters went to the polls in October 2000 to elect their own government, they revealed their moderate leanings. Instead of choosing the hard-line KLA to run the country, as many expected, they elected Ibrahim Rugova, a pacifist philosopher who had led the struggle for Albanian autonomy long before the KLA was even formed.

But outside critics ignored this encouraging sign. Kosovo's tarnished, bloody peace simply ratified the bystanders' earlier, self-justificatory notions that parties that portrayed themselves as "victims" would readily transform themselves into abusers once they were allowed to govern. As a result of Albanian repression, American critics were able to charge NATO with producing two bouts of ethnic cleansing. Allied bombing unleashed the Serb expulsion of 1.3 million Albanians from March to June 1999, and it enabled Albanians to expel 100,000 Kosovo Serbs thereafter." The sui generic ethnic dynamic among Serbs and Albanians was lost on many for- eigners.When American skeptics read about violence in the province, they groaned and concluded, "They're at it again." Many of those looking to justify their prior inaction in the face of atrocities in Bosnia began pointing to Kosovo as proof that when "the parties" did not want to live together, there was nothing that foreign, bomb- or checkbook-wielding do-gooders could do about it.

Perfidy

A third criticism of the intervention was that as it was going on interested governments and refugees inflated the extremity of the violence. Critics charged that U.S. officials lied and refugees exaggerated the atrocities, calling them "genocide" and making up huge numbers of murders.They were allegedly doing so in order to stir up support for the bombing.

The "exaggeration" controversy is rooted in the inescapable difficulty of accurately gauging the scale of atrocities while they are being committed." When Madeleine Albright became secretary of state in 1996, she created an Office of War Crimes Analysis at the State Department on the logic that the best way to be sure the bureaucracy would focus on atrocities was to make it the full-time task of one group of U.S. officials. During NATO's intervention in Serbia in 1999, lawyers in this office worked with officials in the intelligence community to analyze and publicize Serb war crimes as soon as they were discovered. The Clinton administration revealed a deeper commitment to learning about the welfare of missing civilians and refugees than it or any other foreign policy team had done before. Much had changed since 1975, when Cambodian refugees poured into Thailand and found few foreigners awaiting them. When Milosevic deported the Albanian population, the head of the State Department's new war crimes unit, Ambassador David Scheffer, an international lawyer who had served as Albright's deputy at the UN during the Srebrenica and Rwanda genocides, immediately flew to Macedonia, where the refugees were arriving. Scheffer conducted fifteen hours of interviews at the border crossing in Blace, Macedonia, speaking with more than 200 refugees. Scheffer's findings, combined with those of the major human rights groups and journalists, were so disturbing that U.S. officials began debating whether or not the wholesale deportation of the Albanians constituted genocide.

This was the State Department's third "g-word" controversy in six years. In crises past, those who opposed U.S. intervention had tended to oppose use of the term. In this case many supporters of the NATO campaign argued against labeling Milosevic's atrocities genocide. An American humanitarian intervention was warranted by the brutality of Serb ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. Why not leave it at that? As one State Department official who fought the application of the term later recalled, "My view was, `Why do we need to put the genocide label on it?' People are being killed. Women are being sexually violated and stabbed to death." As he put it, "Let's just look at the facts. The facts necessitate action. This was a systematic attack against a civilian population. That is enough. Everyone is caught up in the `Is it or isn't it?' We don't need that debate."

Nonetheless, the debate occurred, and Scheffer prevailed. After a century of avoiding the term "genocide," the State Department authorized its tentative use just ten days into the conflict between NATO and Serbia. At that time U.S. officials feared the Serbs were separating the Albanian men from the rest of the refugees in order to execute them. The Srebrenica precedent chilled those who saw the first refugee convoys crossing into Albania and Macedonia made up mainly of women and children. "What we see unfolding in Kosovo," Scheffer said at a press briefing, "are war crimes, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity. And these are occurring on such a systematic and widespread basis that we have to conclude that we're witnessing what might be described as indicators of genocide unfolding in Kosovo.."a5 Scheffer knew that an authoritative diagnosis of genocide would be impossible to make during the Serb campaign of terror. Nonetheless, he did what Lemkin had long ago urged. Serb expulsions and killings were so wiaespread and well planned that Scheffer used the phrase "indicators of genocide" to capture what the refugees were describing and what human rights investigators were surmising. He did not deliver a formal finding of genocide but raised the specter of genocide. President Clinton himself also used the term on June 25, 1999, citing fears of"delib- erate, systematic efforts at genocide." '° This was a first for a U.S. president.