WITH ALL the world focused on the American elections in November and the Iraqi elections that are scheduled for January next year, Saturday’s poll in Kosovo, only the second since the liberation of the province in 1999, passed almost unnoticed. Perhaps this is because the situation in Kosovo is not promising. Most of the Serb population boycotted the elections: Serbs were subjected to an orchestrated pogrom in March this year, which destroyed years of patient ethnic bridge-building in a few days. Economically, the region is in a parlous state, corruption is rife and there is little outside investment. Criminality, local and international, is also a huge problem.
Nor has the final status of Kosovo been resolved: the Albanian population is determined on independence, the Serbs dead set against. Western policy is complicated by the fact that it has its eye on the much larger prize of reintegrating Serbia and avoiding a civil war in Macedonia. To this end, it is disinclined to do anything that would provide a precedent for the secession of Montenegro, or encouragement to Albanian rebels in Macedonia and southern Serbia. For the moment, Western rhetoric in Kosovo stipulates that certain benchmarks in the economy, minority rights and civil society must be met before there can be any discussion about sovereignty — “standards before status”. But after the riots in March, the prospect of achieving anything approaching the right standards is remote. Another fiasco for Western intervention? Another example of Tony Blair and his American friends rushing in where wiser men would have held back?
By no means. The Nato-led intervention in Kosovo is still generally and rightly seen as justified. It prevented or reversed the “ethnic cleansing” of more than a million Kosvovar Albanians. While many Serbs were forced to flee the province by vengeful Albanians in the aftermath of the intervention, recent figures show that large numbers in rural areas have hung on. And the military defeat in Kosovo loosened so many teeth in the Milosevic regime that his own people finally voted him out in 2000. The Americans and Mr Blair thus played a crucial role in removing the principal threat to stability in the western Balkans.
All this should cause us to reflect a little on Iraq and the whole concept of international military intervention. Here it is crucial to remember that the roots of the present clash between the United States and the United Nations lie in the Bosnian crisis of 1992-95. At that time, it was the received wisdom in London and Paris that nothing could or should be done to save the Bosnian Muslims from ethnic cleansing. Most Americans took a different view and were roundly derided for it, not only by John Major’s Government, but also by the UN’s leadership. Faced with this, the US Congress decided that international law was an ass, coerced President Clinton into unilaterally withdrawing from the policing of the embargo; covertly and “illegally”, the American Government sanctioned military assistance to the Bosnians. In the end, after many massacres, the Americans finally bulldozed the British and the UN aside and saved the Bosnians from disaster. It is no accident that Bosnia has sent a mine-sweeping unit to Iraq as a gesture of solidarity.
In some ways, Bosnia was legally straightforward. It was a sovereign state under attack, which the UN had failed to defend or even to allow to defend itself. Kosovo was much more problematic: here intervention violated the territorial integrity of what was left of Yugoslavia. If the Kosovo war was globally far less controversial than Iraq, it was probably more so in terms of international law. One of the most eloquent supporters of that operation, of course, was Robin Cook, who was then Foreign Secretary, who was in full agreement with Mr Blair and the US Administration. Much of the optimism of the world of September 10, 2001, can be traced back to the sense that the West had developed legal and military doctrines to prevent future Bosnias.
Among the first to call for action against Milosevic, interestingly eno- ugh, were the now notorious neoconservatives, especially Richard Perle, the original “Prince of Darkness”, and the current senior Pentagon figures Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith. This shows that the neocons are by no means exclusively preoccupied with the Middle East and the defence of Israel. Indeed, the conspiracy-theory websites that now obsessively document the activities of neoconservatives condemn the likes of Perle and Feith, in the same breath and without irony, for working for foreign governments such as Israel and Bosnia.
It may well be that, as the former British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd has argued, Kosovo represented the high-water mark of international intervention. However, the recent elections in Afghanistan, for all their faults, confounded the sceptics; they would not have been possible without the removal of the Taleban. But the template of robust humanitarian intervention and regime change has not transferred easily to Iraq. Clearly, having gone to war on a genuinely-held but false premise about Saddam Hussein’s WMD does not help. The invasion should have been more explicitly couched as an overdue humanitarian intervention to remove a murderous tyrant, whose crimes far exceeded those of Milosevic.
One thing, however, is clear. Intervention in the Balkans disproves the notion that American foreign policy, or the variant espoused by neoconservatives, is somehow intrinsically anti-Muslim. If it were not for the United States, those who voted on Saturday would now be refugees or dead. Anybody who knows this will not be surprised that the most Muslim area in Europe, Kosovo, should also be the most pro-American and the most supportive of the War on Terror; there were certainly no “stop the war” protests in Kosovo. Bosnia and Kosovo remain examples of what Western intervention can and should do.
Brendan Simms is author of Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia
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