A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (73 page)

A KLA soldier presents a wallet containing photos of his relatives and one of President Clinton, Summer 1999.

Chapter 12

Kosovo: A Dog and

a Fight

The Road to Confrontation

In the aftermath of NATO's bombing and troop deployment, Bosnia remained fairly peaceful. Many foreigners complained about the lingering hostility among Muslims, Croats, and Serbs and the refusal of the nationalist authorities to allow refugees to return to their homes. But however fragile and unsatisfying the terms and the implementation of the Dayton peace agreement, U.S. leadership had brought the savage war in Bosnia to an end. As 60,000 NATO troops patrolled the war-torn country, they oversaw the demining of former confrontation lines, helped demobilize soldiers and train new army and police forces, escorted families back to burned-down villages, and created an overall sense of security and the stirrings of normalcy.

But NATO forces went only part of the way. Since its creation in 1993, the UN war crimes tribunal at The Hague had compiled a long list of suspects. When Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic signed the Dayton accords on behalf of his Bosnian Serb accomplices, he had urged U.S. officials to defer deciding whether suspected war criminals could hold high office in Bosnia. "In the house of a man just hanged," he said, "don't talk about rope."' Western leaders had listened. The wording of the Dayton agreement was deliberately vague, and Washington, fearing casualties and "another Somalia," refused to order arrests. Indeed, soon after NATO forces were deployed, Commander Admiral Leighton Smith appeared on Bosnian Serb television and publicly denied that his troops had the authority to round up suspects. Smith did not provide his troops with the names or photographs of indictees for whom they should be on the lookout. U.S. military officers said they would make arrests only if ordered to do so directly by the president. They were not going to be hung out to dry, as they felt they had been in Somalia. For the first two years of the "peace," therefore, nationalist thugs in the Balkans continued to run wild.

Only one voice within the Pentagon regularly dissented: that of Wesley C. Clark. Clark, a decorated Vietnam vet and former Rhodes scholar, had been the J-5, or director for strategy and planning on the joint Chiefs, during the Rwanda genocide and for much of the Bosnian war. He had been with Holbrooke in August 1995 when the UN APC had crashed and killed their three colleagues. And he had served as military liaison to the Dayton peace talks and watched Milosevic up close. He urged that war criminals be arrested immediately, while the parties were still smarting from NATO bombing. Not for the last time, Clark was ignored. Instead of ordering arrests, U.S. and European diplomats continued to rely upon Milosevic to stabilize the situation. Although they deemed the Serbian dictator responsible for genocide in Bosnia, Western policyrnakers treated him as an indispensable diplomatic partner. Their first stop was always Belgrade.

Serbia's citizenry held their president in less esteem. The wars orchestrated and funded by Milosevic and fought by Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia had left Serbia ravaged. Five years of militarization, exacerbated by the West's stringent economic sanctions, had sent unemployment and inflation soaring and the people's quality of life tumbling. In 1996 and 1997 Serbia's restive population staged massive demonstrations. Brainwashed by years of Serbian propaganda that held that Serbs were the victims of genocide, the protesters made no mention of Serbia's war crimes. Rather, they demanded an end to Milosevic's corrupt rule and his oppression at home. Milosevic responded by tightening control. He muzzled dissent. He authorized political assassinations. He shut down independent media stations. He stole elections his party could not win. And he began brutalizing ethnic Albanians in the southern Serbian province of Kosovo.

Serbs had an emotional relationship with the penurious Kosovo province. Kosovo had long been immortalized as the site of the 1389 battle on the Field of Blacxbirds, in which the Turks had defeated the Orthodox Christian Serbs, ushering in five centuries of Ottoman rule.' In the second half of the twentieth century, Serbs and Albanians competed for land, jobs, and political privileges in the province. Because of an explosive Albanian birthrate and a Serb exodus, 1.7 million Albanians had come to compose 90 percent of Kosovo's overall population. By the 1980s, feeling outnumbered, Kosovo Serbs had begun complaining of persecution. They received moral support from nationalists in the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. In an inflammatory public memorandum in 1986, the Serbian intellectuals charged Kosovo Albanians with masterminding "the physical, political, legal and cultural genocide of the Serbian population in Kosovo"' The following year, Milosevic, then an undistinguished Communist apparatchik, traveled to Kosovo and stoked anti-Albanian sentiment and Serb fervor. He proclaimed before an angry Serb niob that "no one should dare to beat you!"' In 1989 Milosevic enhanced his nationalist credentials by stripping Kosovo of the autonomy that had been granted it by Yugoslav dictator Marshal Tito. Albanians were fired from their jobs, schools were closed, and the Serb police presence expanded.

In 1995, when NATO bombing forced the Serbs to negotiate a settlement for Bosnia, Kosovo's Albanians had hoped that the United States and its allies would pressure Serbia into restoring the province's autonomy. Instead, Western negotiators at Dayton affirmed Serbia's territorial integrity and did not broach the subject of Kosovo. This embittered many Kosovo Albanians and paved the way for the rise of a shadowy band of Albanian fighters who called themselves the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA).' The KLA pledged to protect the Albanian people in their homes and win independence for the province. The KLA succeeded in raising money from Albanian emigres and smuggling arms from its anarchic neighbor, Albania, but it failed at first to attract many recruits in Kosovo. The tide turned in March 1998, when the KLA gunned down several Serbian policemen and Milosevic struck back so violently that popular support for the KLA soared. Serbian forces swept into the region of Drenica and murdered some fifty-eight relatives of KLA strongman Adem Jashari, including women and children. With every KLA attack on a Serbian official, Serbian reprisals intensified, as Serb gunmen torched whole villages suspected of housing KLA loyalists. In the following year, some 3,000 Albanians were killed and some 300,000 others were expelled from their homes, their property burned and their livelihoods extinguished. Television cameras captured civilians chilled by winter snowfalls and terror.

By the late 1990s, Western observers were familiar with Kosovo. Even back in 1992, when the Bush administration had insisted it had "no dog" in the Bosnia fight, it had expressed concern for Kosovo's fate. In what became known as President Bush's "Christmas warning," acting Secretary of State Eagleburger had advised Milosevic that in the event of a Serbian attack on Kosovo, th,~ United States would be "prepared to employ military force against the Serbs in Kosovo and in Serbia proper"' In April 1993 President Clinton', otherwise gun-shy secretary of state Warren Christopher distinguished Kosovo from Bosnia on the grounds that deterioration in Kosovo would likely "bring into the fray other countries in the region-Albania, Greece, Turkey." The United States, he said, feared conflict there would "as happened before, [broaden] into a world war.' 17 Kosovo was always thought to be "different" from Bosnia because of its potential to unleash violence throughout the rest of the Balkans.

As Serb police and militia committed more and more atrocities in 1998, informed Western journalists and human rights groups descended on the region. The atrocities of the 1990s had taught many American opinionmakers that they could not simultaneously demand both an end to genocide and a policy of nonintervention. Diplomacy without the meaningful threat of military force had too often failed to deter abuse. The Clinton administration came under pressure to respond militarily.

In October 1998 U.S. trouble-shooter Richard Holbrooke again negotiated a deal with Milosevic. In exchange for avoiding NATO air strikes, Milosevic agreed to pull back some of his forces from Kosovo and allow the deployment of 2,O00 unarmed, international verifiers. But Serb forces ignored their presence. On January 15, 1999, after pounding the small town of Racak with artillery fire for three days, Serb paramilitary and police units rounded up and executed forty-five Albanian civilians, including three women, a twelve-year-old boy, and several elderly men. The Serb forces left the bodies of those executed facedown in an icy ravine. Within twenty-four hours, Ambassador William Walker, the head of the Kosovo Verification Mission, arrived at the crime scene. Walker, who had first encountered atrocities while serving as an American diplomat in Central America, debriefed villagers and hiked up a nearby hill, where he saw the first body. "It was covered with a blanket, and when it was pulled back, I saw there was no head on the corpse just an incredibly bloody mess on the neck," Walker told a reporter. He examined three more bodies. On each a bullet hole was visible beneath gray or white hair. Walker roared into the television camera that the Serbs had committed a "crime against humanity.""

Senior officials in the Clinton administration were revolted and enraged. Madeleine Albright, the longtime crusader for intervention, had succeeded Christopher as secretary of state. She and the rest of the Clinton team remembered Srebrenica, were still coming to grips with guilt over the Rwanda genocide, and were looking to make amends. They feared that Racak was just the beginning of a campaign of mini-Srebrenicas. Indeed, a rumor circulated that the Serb forces' motto of the day was, "A massacre a day helps keep NATO away." U.S. officials were accompanied by far more aggressive European diplomats than they had known in the mid-1990s. Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain and his foreign minister, Robin Cook, were intent on stopping Milosevic. In February 1999 the United States and its European allies convened a conference at the French chateau of Rambouillet, outside Paris, and presented a take-it-or-leave-it proposal. Belgrade was required to remove most of its troops from Kosovo, grant significant autonomy to the Albanians, and allow 25,000 armed peacekeepers (4,000 of them American) to be deployed in Serbia. If the Serbs refused, NATO would bomb.The Serbs were accustomed to hollow NATO threats. They were not about to surrender control over a province of great historical and symbolic importance. Serb negotiators refused even to entertain the deal.

Kosovo Albanians forced out of their homes prepare to bury a five-week-old infant who died of exposure in the mountains of Kosovo, Fall 1998.

Beginning on March 24, 1999, NATO jets under the command of General Clark, supreme allied commander for Europe, began bombing Serbia. Allied leaders said they would continue bombing until Milosevic accepted the autonomy compromise. It was the first time in history that the United States or its European allies had intervened to head off a potential genocide."

Response

Values and Interests

The NATO action was not purely humanitarian. Serbia's atrocities had of course provoked NATO action, but Operation Allied Force would probably not have been launched without the perceived threat to more traditional U.S. interests. However real the human suffering of Albanians, the threat to American credibility was also a crucial factor in convincing President Clinton to take action. In a sequence reminiscent of the summer of 1995 in Bosnia, the intensification of Serb violence and the now redundant, duplicitous antics of Milosevic had begun making Clinton, his cabinet, and indeed NATO, which was often invoked in American threats, look silly. It had become humiliating for the alliance to try and fail to deter Serbia, a country of 11 million, which lay within sneezing distance of Hungary, one of NATO's newest members. Western leaders were again, to use Clinton's phrase, "getting creamed"

In addition, after a decade of unrest and with the ascent of the KLA in Kosovo, it was clear that the problem--for Albanians, but also for the United States and Europe-would not go away. Ongoing Serb-Albanian fighting seemed likely to destabilize the fragile ethnic balance in neighboring Macedonia, which was one-quarter Albanian and could not endure the arrival of more Albanians displaced from Kosovo. The Serb crackdown was imperiling the fragile peace in Bosnia, which by then the United States had spent more than $10 billion supporting. Washington was not anxious to see its neighborhood investment squandered. Perhaps most significant, after six years in office, the Clinton administration had built up an institutional memory of its dealings with this particular regime. Because Milosevic was a "repeat offender" and had run circles around the allies hundreds of times the previous decade, U.S. diplomats broke from their traditional tendency to see peace "just around the corner." In short, when NATO began bombing, the Clinton administration was acting with its head as well as its heart.

President Clinton spoke from the Oval Office the night the NATO air campaign began.This time he was the one to invoke the Holocaust. "What if someone had listened to Winston Churchill and stood up to Adolf Hitler earlier?" the president asked. "Just imagine if leaders back then had acted wisely and early enough, how many lives could have been saved, how many Americans would not have had to die?""' Clinton adopted the tactics of so many earlier advocates of intervention inside and outside the U.S. government who had been dismissed as soft and emotional.