>This weekend's NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE has a long profile of life in
>Belgrade, and amidst the tales of kleptocracy and anomie, the author notes
>the absolute apathy of the citizens towards any atrocities that might have
>occured.
Nathan, how different is that from the apathy most Americans demonstrate towards the atrocities their government perpetrates, on a far greater scale? Or Israelis? Or Brits? Or Russians? And what conclusion do you draw from this? That we should bomb Belgrade again until they do care?
By the way, did you catch this bit in today's NY Times?
<quote> Later, Holbrooke met with Veton Surroi, the publisher of the newspaper Koha Ditorer and a politician-in-waiting. Surroi caused a ruckus 10 days ago when he published a stinging article titled "The Sounds of Shame," about the disgrace of Albanian revenge attacks against Serbs and Gypsies, many of them elderly or in their teens, who were clearly not guilty of atrocities against Albanians.
"I have to say that I feel ashamed to hear that for the first time in the history of Kosovo, now the Kosovar Albanians are committing monstrous atrocities," he wrote. "I cannot stop myself from saying that it should deeply concern our people that for the first time our moral code of untouchability of women, children and elderly has been broken."
More importantly, Surroi said, "We must deal with one or more organized systems of violence, which are viciously directed toward the Serbs. And we also have to deal with a system of thinking that lurks behind the violence and assumes that every Serb must be punished for what happened in Kosovo. That system of thinking is called fascism."
Even more controversial, he suggested that this organized violence would, in the absence of Serbs, be turned against other Albanians, and asked: "Is this what we fought for?"
Thaci, entering the Transitional Council meeting a week ago, is said to have commented that if anyone there called him a fascist he would leave the room. </quote>
Michael Pollak, I believe, posted this quote from Michael Mandelbaum's article, "A Perfect Failure: NATO's War Against Yugoslavia," in the Sept/Oct issue of Foreign Affairs: "If there is a Clinton Doctrine...it is this: punishing the innocent in order to express indignation at the guilty." You apparently maintain, alluding to a book that has been massively discredited by Norman Finkelstein, that the Serbs are not so innocent after all. Is that what you're saying?
Mandelbaum's article contains little new, but it's stingingly expressed and becomes especially so when you consider where it's appearing. A few other quotes (I've got the full text scanned - just email me & I'll send it along):
[from "A Perfect Failure: NATO's War Against Yugoslavia," by Michael Mandelbaum, Whitney H. Shepardson Fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations for 1999-2000.]
At the outset of the bombing campaign, the Clinton administration said that it was acting to save lives. Before NATO intervened on March 24, approximately 2,500 people had died in Kosovo's civil war between the Serb authorities and the ethnic Albanian insurgents of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). During the 11 weeks of bombardment, an estimated 10,000 people died violently in the province, most of them Albanian civilians murdered by Serbs.
An equally important NATO goal was to prevent the forced displacement of the Kosovar Albanians. At the outset of the bombing, 230,000 were estimated to have left their homes. By its end, 1.4 million were displaced. Of these, 860,000 were outside Kosovo, with the vast majority in hastily constructed camps in Albania and Macedonia.
The alliance also went to war, by its own account, to protect the precarious political stability of the countries of the Balkans. The result, however, was precisely the opposite: the war made all of them less stable. Albania was flooded with refugees with whom it had no means of coping. In Macedonia, the fragile political balance between Slavs and indigenous Albanians was threatened by the influx of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo. The combination of the Serb rampage on the ground and NATO attacks from the air reduced large parts of Kosovo to rubble. In Serbia proper the NATO air campaign destroyed much of the infrastructure on which economic life depended.
Had this been a war fought for national interests, and had the eviction of Serb forces from Kosovo been an important interest Of NATO's member countries, the war could be deemed a success, although a regrettably costly one. But NATO waged the war not for its interests but on behalf of its values. The supreme goal was the wellbeing of the Albanian Kosovars. By this standard, although the worst outcome - the permanent exile of the Albanians from Kosovo - was avoided, the war was not successful.
[...]
But there are reasons for skepticism about the Clinton administration's assertion that Milosevic's spring offensive against the Kosovar Albanians, like Hitler's war against the Jews, was long intended and carefully planned. Milosevic had, after all, controlled the province for ten years without attempting anything approaching what happened in 1999. In October 1998, Serb forces launched an offensive against the KLA that drove 400,000 people from their homes. A cease-fire was arranged, and a great many returned. A team of unarmed monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) was dispatched to the province to give the Albanians a measure of protection. At the outset of 1999, the cease-fire broke down, violated by both sides. Although a concerted effort to reinforce the ceasefire and strengthen the international observers could not have ended the violence altogether, it might have limited the assaults on noncombatants and averted the disaster that Kosovo suffered. Containing the fighting could have bought time for what was necessary for a peaceful resolution of the conflict: a change of leadership in Belgrade. Removing Milosevic from office was by no means an impossible proposition. He was not popular with Serbs (the subsequent NATO assault temporarily increased his popularity), he did not exercise anything resembling totalitarian control over Serbia, and prolonged demonstrations in 1996-97 had almost toppled him.
[...]
Albright later said that "before resorting to force, NATO went the extra mile to find a peaceful resolution," but the terms on which the bombing ended cast doubt on her assertion: they included important departures from Rambouillet that amount to concessions to the Serbs. The United Nations received ultimate authority for Kosovo, giving Russia, a country friendly to the Serbs, the power of veto. The Rambouillet document had called for a referendum after three years to decide Kosovo's ultimate status, which would certainly have produced a large majority for independence; the terms on which the war ended made no mention of a referendum. And whereas Rambouillet gave NATO forces unimpeded access to all of Yugoslavia, including Serbia, the June settlement allowed the affiance free rein only in Kosovo.
Whether such modifications, if offered before the bombing began and combined with a more robust OSCE presence in Kosovo, could have avoided what followed can never be known. What is clear is that NATO's leaders believed that concessions were unnecessary because a few exemplary salvos would quickly bring the Serbs to heel. "I think this is ... achievable within a relatively short period of time," Albright said when the bombing began. She and her colleagues were said to consider Milosevic a Balkan "schoolyard bully' who would back down when challenged. Apparently the customs in Serbian schoolyards differ from those in the institutions where the senior officials of the Clinton administration were educated, for he did not back down. NATO thus began its war on the basis of a miscalculation. It was a miscalculation that exacted a high price. The people of the Balkans paid it.
[...]
Nor did the way the war was fought set a useful precedent. The basic procedure for the conduct of a "just war" is to spare noncombatants. NATO was scrupulous about trying to avoid direct attacks on civilians. But by striking infrastructure in Serbia, including electrical grids and water facilities, the alliance did considerable indirect damage to the civilian population there. Besides harming those whom NATO's political leaders had proclaimed innocent of the crimes committed in Kosovo - for which they blamed Milosevic not the Serb people-these strikes violated Article 1-4 of the 1977 Protocol to the 1949 Geneva Convention, which bars attacks on "Objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population."
The bombing of Serbia, moreover, continued an ugly pattern that the Clinton administration had followed in Haiti and Iraq, a pattern born of a combination of objection to particular leaders and reluctance to risk American casualties. As with Milosevic the administration had opposed the policies of the military junta that had seized power in Haiti and of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. As in the case of Yugoslavia, invading those two countries to remove the offending leadership was militarily feasible but politically unattractive for the Clinton administration. In all three countries, the administration therefore took steps short of invasion that inflicted suffering on the civilian population-the crushing embargoes of Haiti and Iraq were the equivalents of the bombing of the Serb infrastructure - without (until October 1994 in Haiti, and to the present in Iraq) removing the leaders from power. If there is a Clinton Doctrine - an innovation by the present administration in the conduct of foreign policy - it is this: punishing the innocent in order to express indignation at the guilty.
[...]
The official most closely identified with the war was Albright. When it ended, she spoke to troops in Macedonia preparing to enter Kosovo as peacekeepers. "This is what America is good at," she said, "helping people." The help the Albanian Kosovars needed was with rebuilding their homes and their lives. Here, the Clinton administration's track record was not encouraging: it had promised order in Somalia and left chaos. It had gone to Haiti to restore democracy and had left anarchy. It had bombed in Bosnia for the sake of national unity but presided over a de facto partition. But since Clinton had made clear that little money for recovery would come from the United States, the Kosovars' prospects depended on whether, at the end of the twentieth century, "helping people" was what Europe had come to be good at.
Albright was on firmer ground with another assertion. Kosovo, she said, was "simply the most important thing we have done in the world." This proved accurate, in no small part due to her efforts. And unlike the other political consequences Of NATO's Yugoslav war, it was, for her, entirely intentional. In an administration increasingly preoccupied with its legacy, she had thereby produced one for herself. Focusing the vast strength of American foreign policy on a tiny former Ottoman possession of no strategic importance or economic value, with which the United States had no ties of history, geography, or sentiment, is something that not even the most powerful and visionary of her predecessors - not Thomas Jefferson or John Quincy Adams, not Charles Evans Hughes or Dean Acheson - could ever have imagined, let alone achieved. But as American bombs fell on Yugoslavia, Madeleine Albright had done both.