Interventions (11 page)

Beginning in early 1998, we managed to place Kosovo on the agenda of the Security Council, allowing us to present the Council with periodic reports on the developments on the ground. By summer, some two hundred thousand Kosovars had been made refugees, 10 percent of the province's population. At this point I started speaking out with greater frequency about the need to avoid another Bosnia. As the crisis escalated in the summer and autumn of 1998, I decided that this time we would place the United Nations squarely on the side of the victims of aggression in the Balkans and offer no legitimacy to the well-worn propaganda coming out of Belgrade. This became a careful balancing act, as the pressures to act from Europe and the United States were met with implacable opposition by Russia, which still saw Serbia as a key ally and did not want to see a repeat of the punishment Miloševic received at the end of the Bosnian war.

I decided to speak out for two reasons: First, because I believed the best way of halting the terror and violence and preventing a wider war—even one fought for humanitarian reasons—was to make clear to Miloševic that he would not be able to use the United Nations, or at least its secretary-general, in a drawn-out diplomatic dance while his forces went on a rampage in Kosovo. A united international front, I believed, would lead him to capitulate on his most egregious war aims sooner. Second, and of equal importance, was the opportunity that the crisis in Kosovo provided: to draw a new line in international affairs, to set a new standard in how we held states responsible for the treatment and protection of the people within their own borders. We had to make clear that the rights of sovereign states to noninterference in their internal affairs could not override the rights of individuals to freedom from gross and systematic abuses of their human rights.

The shift in policy, controversial as it was among many member states wedded to the sacrosanct principle of sovereignty, was not without its challenges within the United Nations Secretariat itself. The Kosovo crisis led to a fierce debate among my advisors that cast into stark relief the lessons of our past decade in peacekeeping. On one side were the views of the career diplomats and Secretariat officials: they maintained that the duly recognized government in Belgrade had the right and the duty to maintain order within its territory, and that it was not for the UN—and certainly not its secretary-general—to call attention to violations of human rights in Kosovo and urge a forceful response by outside powers. On the other side were those advisors who argued that for us to maintain a blind neutrality in the face of the recidivist behavior of a well-known predatory regime intent upon ethnically cleansing yet another group in the Balkans would destroy our standing—especially with all those who looked to the United Nations to protect would-be victims of atrocities.

My own instinct was to maintain our credibility and authority with the main parties of the Security Council, including Russia, who were seeking to put an end to the violence, while making clear that this time, our own response would be different—the UN, I believed, needed to stand for the rights of the individual as strongly as it did for the rights of states. Post-Bosnia and post-Rwanda, I knew that the UN in the eyes of many was being judged on its ability to deal with gross violations of human rights and crimes against humanity.

I signaled this early on, during a visit to a NATO conference in June 1998. NATO leaders were meeting on the question of Bosnia as a test case for collective security in the next century. Traditionally, a UN secretary-general would appear at a meeting of a military alliance to urge the peaceful resolution of disputes, above all other values. On this occasion, I urged the intensification of diplomacy backed by the credible threat of force and sought to impress on them a sense of urgency. Calling on our experience of Bosnia, I urged them to ensure that the future of collective security would be both effective and legitimate. One without the other—as we had learned, and would learn again later in Iraq—would not do.

“Credible force,” I noted to the NATO leaders, “without legitimacy may have immediate results but will not enjoy long-term international support. Legitimate force without credibility may enjoy universal support but prove unable to implement basic provisions of its mandate.” I insisted that all the talk of lessons learned about the credibility, legitimacy, and morality of intervention would be hollow without applying those lessons practically and emphatically where horror threatens. Kosovo, I said, was now that threat. This time, we could “not be surprised by the means employed or by the ends pursued,” I warned, and I explicitly applauded the determination of NATO governments to prevent a further escalation of the fighting. I concluded my remarks with as direct a call for the use of force as I ever made during my time as secretary-general: “All our professions of regret; all our expressions of determination to never again permit another Bosnia; all our hopes for a peaceful future for the Balkans will be cruelly mocked if we allow Kosovo to become another killing field.”

Later that month, at a conference in Britain, hosted by the Ditchley Foundation, I set out the case for humanitarian intervention more broadly by examining its history. In that speech, I defined it as part of other interventions, including, say, a case of a surgeon who intervenes to save a life, or a teacher who intervenes to prevent the malicious bullying of a child in school. My point was that intervention was a cause for everyone, and one not limited by any means to the use of military force.

Even during the Cold War, I went on in my speech, when the UN's own enforcement capacity was largely paralyzed by divisions in the Security Council, there were cases of extreme violations of human rights within a country that led to military intervention by one of its neighbors. In 1971, an Indian intervention ended the civil war in East Pakistan, allowing Bangladesh to achieve independence. In 1978, Vietnam intervened in Cambodia, putting an end to the genocidal rule of the Khmer Rouge. In 1979, Tanzania intervened to overthrow Idi Amin's erratic and brutal dictatorship in Uganda.

In all three of those cases the intervening states cited refugee flows across their borders to legitimize their action under international law. But what justified their actions in the eyes of the world was the internal character of the regimes they acted against. History has largely ratified that verdict. Few would now deny that, in those cases, forceful intervention was a lesser evil than allowing massacres and extreme oppression of that kind to continue.

When people are in danger, I insisted, everyone has a duty to speak out. No one has a right to pass by on the other side.

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I
n Kosovo, meanwhile, as we were debating the necessity of intervention at UN headquarters, the violence continued to escalate into the autumn of 1998 with tens of thousands of Kosovar Albanians being forced from their homes. Seeking to end the crisis, Richard Holbrooke—then the U.S. special envoy for the Balkans—negotiated the insertion of two thousand unarmed Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) verifiers to monitor a fragile cease-fire agreement. And on September 23, the Security Council adopted resolution 1199, which demanded the withdrawal of Yugoslav forces from Kosovo. NATO followed this up with its own threat of action if Miloševic refused to comply. It was a surprise to no one when Miloševic continued his campaign unabated.

In my own reports to the Security Council, I pointed with increased urgency to the escalating violence and placed responsibility squarely on the Yugoslav authorities for the killings gaining in pace. On October 4, I described what was happening as a “campaign of terror and violence.” Reflecting the widening chasm between Belgrade and the international community, I received a letter later that day from the Yugoslav foreign minister, whose first sentence stated that “Peace prevails in Kosovo” and that “full freedom of movement had been ensured.” When I called MiloÅ¡evic a few days later to urge acceptance of the UN's demands, he repeated this claim and said that over the past two weeks, there had been “no conflict in Kosovo.” He added for good measure that “the problems are only with the Albanians.”

That same week, I spoke with British foreign secretary Robin Cook, who drew his own parallels to the worst acts of ethnic violence in the Bosnian war. We agreed, on the basis of our common experience with MiloÅ¡evic, that he would likely respond only to force. I reminded Cook that MiloÅ¡evic was an expert in creating a “mirage” of cooperation when the reality was one of applying brute force as long as he was able to get away with it.

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A
s most of us feared and expected, the Kosovo Verification Mission increasingly became a powerless witness to an escalating Serbian campaign, which culminated in mid-January with the massacre of some forty-five men, women, and children at the village of Racak. In the following two months, as the violence and fighting intensified, new attempts to negotiate a settlement continued with talks in Rambouillet, France. There the Kosovars were persuaded to sign an agreement on substantial autonomy within the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The Serbs, however, refused to sign, bent on maintaining their pattern of aggression and miscalculation until the very end.

Throughout the crisis, I had maintained a very close relationship with Javier Solana, the cerebral and shrewd Spanish NATO secretary-general who combined a deep aversion to war with his own determination, as a proud European, not to allow Miloševic to make a mockery of the continent's commitment to peace and human rights once again. In a call on March 17, we spoke of how no one seemed to be getting through to Miloševic—not his Russian allies nor Holbrooke, with whom he had negotiated an end to the war in Bosnia.

It was clear that the moment of truth had arrived when the OSCE observers were ordered to leave Kosovo. On the evening of March 23, Solana called me again to say that Holbrooke would be returning from Belgrade to the NATO headquarters in Brussels with “very bad news.” He told me that he would be transferring the authority to launch a military operation to the Supreme Allied Commander Europe imminently, meaning that military action by NATO would soon begin. With Russian opposition to any resolution mandating the use of force, this meant NATO would be breaking with the will of the Security Council. But something had to be done, and we discussed our shared view of how out of touch with reality MiloÅ¡evic seemed—and that once again this was leading to war in the Balkans.

The next morning, on March 24, I received a call from Madeleine Albright, who wanted to emphasize that NATO had had no choice but to act. Albright spoke in that tone that I had come to expect from her by then: though a friend and ally, she had never quite understood that although the United States had supported my candidacy for secretary-general, I had to maintain an independent dedication to the principles of the Charter and be seen to be responsive to the wishes of all member states of the United Nations.

I told her that I'd be issuing a statement in response to the NATO military action speaking of the failure of the Serbs to comply with the demands of the international community, while emphasizing that it would have been “preferable” if the action had been authorized by the Council. When I said that I would be indicating that the Council should always be involved with the decision by states to use force, she replied bluntly: “We don't agree.” I thought her State Department lawyers may have thought differently on this matter, but recalled her response to a similar legal point made by Robin Cook, the UK foreign secretary: “Get yourself some new lawyers” had been her retort. In ending our call, she acknowledged, nonetheless, that “you are Secretary-General of the United Nations, and I am the Secretary of State of the United States—that's life. But if we had put this to a Security Council vote, the Russians would have vetoed it, and people would have continued to die.” I left my response unspoken, but I agreed.

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L
ater that day, NATO began a campaign of air strikes to drive the Serbian forces from Kosovo and bring an end to their campaign of killings and mass expulsion of the civilian population of the province. I saw this as a tragedy—as is every resort to war. Those who believe otherwise have seen nothing of its consequences. But I also knew that a greater evil would have been to allow the unfettered rampage of Serbian forces in Kosovo.

What made the situation more complicated for me was the fact that I was secretary-general of the United Nations at a time when NATO had taken this action without seeking Security Council authorization. The Charter of the United Nations is clear: except in cases of self-defense, the use of force must be authorized by the Council in order to be in conformity with international law. What was equally clear to me, however, was that Miloševic had left the international community with no other option, and that none of the international community's claims to never allowing another Bosnia would be credible if he was permitted to continue his campaign of cleansing against yet another Balkan people.

Throughout the Kosovo crisis, with no United Nations peacekeeping or diplomatic presence on the ground, I had focused my efforts on ensuring that the challenge before the international community was understood as clearly as possible. If we were to avoid a conflict, Miloševic would have to understand that this time the United Nations would recognize his wars as the wanton acts of aggression that they were—and that he had no option but to agree to the demands of the international community. Now that NATO had acted to enforce those demands, the debate among my advisors returned to the surface.

The Department of Political Affairs drew up a statement for me that focused on the Security Council's primary responsibility for the maintenance of peace and security, emphasizing my regret at the use of force without the Council's authorization. Aides in my office reacted strongly to this draft. They argued that it would be a betrayal of all that I had said in the preceding months about the need to hold Miloševic accountable—and about placing the United Nations on the side of civilians under siege from their own government—if I were now to merely lament the enforcement action. In conformity with my instructions, they amended the draft and began the statement instead by assigning responsibility for the recourse to military force to the Yugoslav authorities: