>Of all the violations of international law, the one I find the most
>striking, and the least discussed, is the Vienna Convention on the Law of
>Treaties that _The Nation_ mentioned in its editorial: "It is illegal
>under international law to use force to compel any state to sign an
>international agreement." Which means NATO was violating international
>law even before we dropped the bombs by threatening to if Milo didn't
>sign. The whole Rambouillet process was a violation of international law,
>as is everything we've ever done in Iraq. It makes sense when you think
>about it -- valid treaties are consented to, and there is no consent under
>duress. But this sort of threat seems to be regarded these days as the
>soul of international uprightness. Does anyone know if there wiggle room
>in this convention the Nation didn't mention?
Niall Ferguson wrote in Saturday's Financial Times:
[...] Without doubt the behaviour of Slobodan Milosevic's government towards the Albanian majority in Kosovo - persecution which has been going on, incidentally, for an entire decade - has unquestionably been vile. But Kosovo is an integral province of Serbia. This war amounts to aggression against a sovereign state, something which it is not easy to reconcile with Article 2 of the UN Charter, the Helsinki Accord's Final Act or indeed Nato's own defensive rationale.
Historically, there have been two justifications offered for such action. The first is the right of self-determination, a concept dating back to the French revolutionary wars of the 1790s which was also used to justify the wars of Italian and German unification between 1859 and 1870 and revived by US President Woodrow Wilson in 1917 as an American war aim for central and eastern Europe.
Yet self-determination is not the objective in Kosovo. In the early 1990s, the western powers (led by Germany) recognised the independence of Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina, and then left them to fend for themselves against Serbia and the Serb minorities within their own borders.
In 1999 the opposite has happened. There has been no recognition of Kosovan independence, just air strikes. Nothing has been done to save the Kosovan Liberation Army from what seems likely to be annihilation.
The second, and most recent, excuse for going to war with a sovereign state is the humanitarian one. This has been used by the US several times since the end of the cold war, notably in Northern Iraq and Somalia. But in the case of Somalia, the action was backed by UN authorisation. Although resolutions have been passed by the Security Council concerning Kosovo, there has been no mandate to use force, and it is unlikely such a mandate would have been granted given Russian and Chinese opposition.
This decision to circumvent the UN will come back to haunt the Nato powers. Henceforth, it will be extremely hard for the US and its allies in Nato to make a credible complaint if, for example, China were to bomb Taiwan, or if a more militaristic regime in Russia decided to reassemble the Soviet empire by force. It will be easy enough for tomorrow's aggressors to trump up a "humanitarian crisis" and then simply bypass the UN, citing Kosovo as the precedent.
So Nato seems to be faced with the choice of losing to Milosevic or getting embroiled in a protracted and potentially costly conflict with perilous implications for international stability in the future. [...]