LE MONDE DIPLOMATIQUE - May 1999
WAR IN THE BALKANS
Nato, master of the world
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Meeting in Washington for the 50th anniversary of the North
Atlantic Treaty Organisation, the member states on 26 April
ratified the New Strategic Concept proposed by the United States.
This permits Nato to go beyond its defensive role and intervene
militarily, without a mandate from the United Nations, against a
sovereign state. The token reference to the UN may satisfy France
but does not seriously modify US power. The war in the Balkans,
conducted without the authorisation of the Security Council, in the
name of humanitarian intervention, and the new strategic concept
mark a turning point in the global order. For the first time since
1945 the victors of the second world war (less Russia) have ignored
the sole source of international legality, the UN - without
replacing it. This allows China, India or Russia, for example, to
conduct similar interventions in their own spheres of influence;
and increases the risks of injustice and conflict throughout the
world.
by NOAM CHOMSKY *
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There are many questions about the bombing of Yugoslavia by the North
Atlantic Treaty Organisation - meaning primarily the United States.
They come down to two fundamental issues: what are the accepted and
applicable "rules of world order" and how do these or other
considerations apply in the case of Kosovo?
There is a regime of international law and international order,
binding on all states, based on the United Nations Charter and
subsequent resolutions and World Court decisions. In brief, the threat
or use of force is banned unless explicitly authorised by the Security
Council after it has determined that peaceful means have failed, or
else in self-defence against "armed attack" (a narrow concept) until
the Security Council takes action.
There is, of course, more to say. There is at least a tension, if not
an outright contradiction, between the rules of world order laid down
in the UN Charter and the rights articulated in the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, a second pillar of the world order
established under US initiative after the second world war. The
charter bans force violating state sovereignty; the UD guarantees the
rights of individuals against oppressive states. The issue of
"humanitarian intervention" arises from this tension. It is this right
that is claimed by the US/Nato in Kosovo, and is generally supported
by editorial opinion and news reports (in the latter case,
reflexively, even through the very choice of terminology).
The question is addressed in a news report in the New York Times (1),
headlined "Legal Scholars Support Case for Using Force" in Kosovo. One
example is offered: Allen Gerson, former counsel to the US mission to
the UN. Two other legal scholars are cited. One, Ted Galen Carpenter,
"scoffed at the Administration argument" and dismissed the alleged
right of intervention. The third is Jack Goldsmith, a specialist on
international law at Chicago Law school. He says that critics of the
Nato bombing "have a pretty good legal argument" but "many people
think [an exception for humanitarian intervention] does exist as a
matter of custom and practice". That summarises the evidence offered
to justify the favoured conclusion stated in the headline.
Goldsmith's observation is reasonable, at least if we agree that facts
are relevant to the determination of "custom and practice". We may
also bear in mind a truism: the right of humanitarian intervention, if
it exists, is premised on the "good faith" of those intervening, and
that assumption is based not on their rhetoric but on their record, in
particular their record of adherence to the principles of
international law, World Court decisions, and so on.
Consider, for example, Iranian offers to intervene in Bosnia to
prevent massacres at a time when the West would not do so. These were
dismissed with ridicule (in fact, ignored); if there was a reason
beyond subordination to power, it was because Iranian "good faith"
could not be assumed. A rational person then asks obvious questions:
is the Iranian record of intervention and terror worse than that of
the US? And how should we assess the "good faith" of the only country
to have vetoed a Security Council resolution calling on all states to
obey international law? What about its historical record? Unless such
questions are prominent on the agenda of discourse, an honest person
will dismiss it as mere allegiance to doctrine. A useful exercise is
to determine how much of the literature - media or other - survives
such elementary conditions as these.
How do these or other considerations apply in the case of Kosovo?
There has been a humanitarian catastrophe in Kosovo in the past year,
overwhelmingly attributable to Yugoslav military forces. The main
victims have been ethnic Albanian Kosovars, some 90% of the population
of this Yugoslav territory. The standard estimate is 2,000 deaths and
hundreds of thousands of refugees. In such cases, outsiders have three
choices: solution 1, try to escalate the catastrophe; solution 2, do
nothing; solution 3, try to mitigate the catastrophe. The choices can
be illustrated by other contemporary cases. Let us keep to a few of
approximately the same scale and ask where Kosovo fits into the
pattern.
To start with Colombia, according to State Department estimates the
annual level of political killing by the government and its
paramilitary associates is about at the level of Kosovo, and refugee
flight (primarily from their atrocities) is well over a million.
Colombia has been the leading Western recipient of US arms and
training as violence has grown through the 1990s, and that assistance
is now increasing under a "drug war" pretext dismissed by almost all
serious observers. The Clinton administration was particularly
enthusiastic in its praise for President Gaviria, whose tenure in
office was responsible for "appalling levels of violence" according to
human rights organisations, even surpassing his predecessors. Details
are readily available. In this case, the US reaction was solution 1:
escalate the atrocities.
Then there is Turkey. By very conservative estimates, Turkish
repression of Kurds in the 1990s falls into the category of Kosovo. It
peaked in the early 1990s; one index is the flight of over a million
Kurds from the countryside to the unofficial Kurdish capital
Diyarbakir from 1990-94, as the Turkish army was devastating the
countryside. The second year marked two records: it was "the year of
the worst repression in the Kurdish provinces" of Turkey, as US
journalist Jonathan Randal reported from the scene, and also the year
when Turkey became "the biggest single importer of American military
hardware and thus the world's largest arms purchaser". When human
rights groups exposed Turkey's use of US jets to bomb villages, the
Clinton administration found ways to evade laws requiring suspension
of arms deliveries, much as it was doing in Indonesia and elsewhere.
Again Washington opted for solution 1.
Colombia and Turkey explain their (US-supported) atrocities on the
grounds that they are defending their countries from the threat of
terrorist guerrillas - as does the government of Slobodan Milosevic.
The third example is Laos. Every year thousands of people, mostly
children and poor farmers, are killed in the Plain of Jars in Northern
Laos, the scene of the heaviest bombing of civilian targets in history
it appears, and arguably the most cruel. Washington's furious assault
on a poor peasant society had little to do with its wars in the
region. The worst period was from 1968, when Washington was compelled
to undertake negotiations - under popular and business pressure -
ending the regular bombardment of North Vietnam. Henry Kissinger and
Richard Nixon then decided to shift the planes to bombardment of Laos
and Cambodia.
The deaths are from "bombies", tiny anti-personnel weapons, far worse
than land-mines. They are designed specifically to kill and maim, and
have no effect on trucks, buildings, etc. The Jars plain was saturated
with hundreds of millions of these criminal devices, which have a
failure-to-explode rate of 20%-30% according to the manufacturer,
Honeywell. The numbers suggest either remarkably poor quality control
or a rational policy of murdering civilians by delayed action. These
were only a fraction of the technology deployed, including advanced
missiles to penetrate caves where families sought shelter. Current
annual casualties from "bombies" are estimated from hundreds to "an
annual nationwide casualty rate of 20,000," more than half of them
deaths, according to the veteran Asia reporter Barry Wain of the Asia
edition of the Wall Street Journal. The crisis this year seems
approximately comparable to Kosovo, though deaths are far more highly
concentrated among children .
There have been efforts to publicise and deal with the humanitarian
catastrophe. A British-based Mine Advisory Group (MAG) is trying to
remove the lethal objects, but the US is "conspicuously missing from
the handful of Western organisations that have followed MAG," the
British press says, though it has finally agreed to train some Laotian
civilians. The UK press also reports, with some anger, the allegation
of MAG specialists that the US refuses to provide them with "render
harmless procedures" that would make their work "a lot quicker and a
lot safer". These remain a state secret, as does the whole affair in
the US. The Bangkok press reports a very similar situation in
Cambodia, particularly the eastern region where US bombardment from
early 1969 was most intense.
In this case, the US opted for solution 2: do nothing. And the
reaction of the media and commentators was to keep silent, following
the norms under which the war against Laos was designated a "secret
war" - meaning well-known but suppressed, as was also the case in
Cambodia from March 1969. The level of self-censorship was
extraordinary then, as is the current phase. The relevance of this
shocking example needs no further comment.
There are many other examples of solutions 1 and 2, and also much more
serious contemporary atrocities, such as the huge slaughter of Iraqi
civilians by means of a particularly vicious form of biological
warfare. "A very hard choice" said US Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright on national television in 1996 when asked for her reaction to
the killing of half a million Iraqi children in five years, but "we
think the price is worth it". Current estimates are about 5,000
children killed a month and the price is still "worth it." These and
other examples might also be kept in mind when we read awed rhetoric
about how the "moral compass" of the Clinton administration is at last
functioning properly, as the Kosovo example illustrates.
Just what does the example illustrate? The threat of Nato bombing
predictably led to a sharp escalation of atrocities by the Serbian
army and paramilitaries, and to the departure of international
observers, which of course had the same effect. Nato Commander General
Wesley Clark declared that it was "entirely predictable" that Serb
terror and violence would intensify after the Nato bombing, exactly as
happened. Kosovo is therefore another illustration of solution 1: try
to escalate the violence, with exactly that expectation.
Perhaps the most compelling example of solution 3 (trying to limit
violence) is the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in December 1978,
terminating Pol Pot's atrocities which were then at their peak.
Vietnam pleaded the right of self-defence against armed attack - one
of the few post-UN Charter examples when the plea is plausible. The
Khmer Rouge regime (Democratic Kampuchea, DK) was carrying out
murderous attacks against Vietnam in border areas.
The US reaction was instructive. The press condemned the "Prussians"
of Asia for their outrageous violation of international law. They were
harshly punished for the crime of having terminated Pol Pot's
slaughters, first by a (US-backed) Chinese invasion, then by US
imposition of extremely harsh sanctions. The US recognised the
expelled DK as the official government of Cambodia because of its
"continuity" with the Pol Pot regime, the State Department explained.
Not too subtly, the US supported the Khmer Rouge in its continuing
attacks in Cambodia. The example tells us more about the "custom and
practice" that underlies "the emerging legal norms of humanitarian
intervention".
Despite the desperate efforts of ideologues to prove that circles are
square, there is no serious doubt that the Nato bombings further
undermine what remains of the fragile structure of international law.
The US made that entirely clear in the discussions leading to the Nato
decision. Apart from the UK (by now about as much of an independent
actor as the Ukraine was in the pre-Gorbachev years), Nato countries
were sceptical of US policy and were particularly annoyed by
Albright's "sabre-rattling" (2).
Today, the more closely one approaches the conflicted region, the
greater the opposition to Washington's insistence on force, even
within Nato (Greece and Italy). France had called for a UN Security
Council resolution to authorise deployment of Nato peacekeepers. The
US flatly refused, insisting on "its stand that Nato should be able to
act independently of the United Nations", State Department officials
explained. The US refused to permit the word "authorise" to appear in
the final Nato statement, unwilling to concede any authority to the UN
Charter and international law. Only the word "endorse" was permitted.
Similarly the bombing of Iraq was a brazen expression of contempt for
the UN, even the specific timing, and was so understood (3). And of
course the same is true of the destruction of half the pharmaceutical
production of Sudan a few months earlier (4). It could be argued,
rather plausibly, that further demolition of the rules of world order
is irrelevant, just as it had lost its meaning by the late 1930s. The
contempt of the world's leading power for the framework of world order
has become so extreme that there is nothing left to discuss.
This stance is not new: it began to gain overt expression during the
Kennedy years. The main innovation of the Reagan-Clinton years is that
this defiance has become entirely open. The highest authorities
explained with brutal clarity that the World Court, the UN and other
agencies had become irrelevant because they no longer followed US
orders, as they did in the early post-war years.
Under Clinton the defiance of world order has become so extreme as to
be of concern even to hawkish policy analysts. In the current issue of
the leading establishment journal Foreign Affairs, Samuel Huntington
warns that Washington is treading a dangerous course. In the eyes of
much of the world - probably most of the world, he suggests - the US
is "becoming the rogue superpower", considered "the single greatest
external threat to their societies". A realistic "international
relations theory," he argues, predicts that coalitions may arise to
counterbalance the rogue superpower (5).
Where does that leave the question of what to do in Kosovo? It leaves
it unanswered. The US has chosen a course of action which, as it
explicitly recognises, escalates atrocities and violence: a course of
action that also strikes yet another blow against the regime of
international order, which does offer the weak at least some limited
protection from predatory states. A standard argument is that we had
to do something: we could not simply stand by as atrocities continued.
That is never true. One choice, always, is to follow the Hippocratic
principle: "First, do no harm." If you can think of no way to adhere
to that elementary principle, then do nothing. There are always ways
that can be considered. Diplomacy and negotiations are never at an
end.
Recognised principles of international law and world order, solemn
treaty obligations, decisions by the World Court, considered
pronouncements by the most respected commentators - these do not
automatically solve particular problems. Each issue has to be
considered on its merits. For those who do not adopt the standards of
Saddam Hussein, there is a heavy burden of proof to meet in
undertaking the threat or use of force in violation of the principles
of international order. Perhaps the burden can be met, but that has to
be shown, not merely proclaimed with passionate rhetoric. The
consequences of such violations have to be assessed carefully. And for
those who are minimally serious, the reasons for the actions also have
to be assessed - and not simply by adulation of our leaders and their
"moral compass".
* Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). This text
was specially written for Le Monde diplomatique. Noam Chomski's
writings can be found on his website: http://www.zmag.org
Original text in English
(1) New York Times, 27 March 1999.
(2) Kevin Cullen, The Boston Globe, 22 February 1999.
(3) See Alain Gresh, "War without end against Iraq", Le Monde
diplomatique in English, January 1999.
(4) See Alain Gresh, "Holy war", Le Monde diplomatique in English,
September 1998.
(5) Samuel Huntington, " The Lonely Superpower ", Foreign Affairs, New
York, March-April 1999.
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