Blood on Hands

Readers can check my original article, Chomsky's response, my rebuttal, and his response to this, which explain the somewhat uncharitable tone I adopt in this. For some reason, having someone who is "objectively" making excuses for mass murder in the Balkans accusing me of having blood on my hands, vexes me.
Ian Williams


Response to Chomsky II

Ian Williams | September 8, 2009

Editor: John Feffer


Foreign Policy In Focus
www.fpif.org

I look hard but fail to see a moral or logical compass in Chomsky's fast and loose recital of dates and deaths. In the end, his argument reduces to two basic principles. If someone other than the United States commits mass murder they did so with American encouragement, and so the guilt is ultimately Washington's. Or they did it in response to American actions, which either exonerates them or in some way mitigates their crime.

The second principle is that intervention to stop mass murder is wrong — particularly if the only powers with the economic and military strength for effective intervention, i.e. the "imperialist" powers, are behind it.

I am well aware of the dangers of humanitarian intervention as a doctrine. It was I, after all, who recorded the comment of a UN legal officer at the time of the Kurdish crisis post-Desert Storm, that the only legal precedent for "humanitarian intervention" was Hitler's invocation of the plight of Sudeten Germans.

However, the Axworthy Commission, whose consideration of the issue laid the groundwork for the Responsibility to Protect principle adopted at the 2005 UN General Assembly, considered those dangers and recommended a set of tests to avert politically expedient abuses of the principle — which, incidentally, clearly cut the legs off Blair's retrospective attempt to justify the Iraqi invasion as humanitarian intervention.

Like surgery, humanitarian intervention is only to be used as a last resort, but it is occasionally beneficial. I agree with Chomsky's comment to David Barsamian in Class Warfare: "I don't think you can give a general principle about when the use of military force is legitimate. It depends on what the alternatives are. So there are circumstances in which maybe that's just the least bad of the available circumstances. You just have to look at things on a case-by-case basis. There are some general principles one can adhere to, but they don't lead to specific conclusions for every conceivable case." But the professor doesn't seem to agree with himself. In this context, Chomsky is a political Seventh Day Adventist, opposed to military intervention in absolute dogmatic terms. Such attachment to state sovereignty is touching for him and his acolytes — but it suggests that their appeals to traditions of left internationalism are spurious at best and disingenuous at worst.

In Chomsky's Alice in Wonderland world, causality has been reversed: NATO intervenes to stop massacres and is accused of precipitating them. By the same looking-glass logic, my agreement with the UN General Assembly that the international community has a responsibility to prevent mass murders such as those perpetrated in East Timor, Bosnia, Kosovo, Sudan, and Rwanda, puts "blood on my hands" — and, according to at least one Chomskyite acolyte, makes me an "apologist for mass murder."

For a sense of Chomsky's own relaxed attitude about such mass murders, one just has to look at his breathtaking comments about Kosovo: "Up until the US/NATO bombing March 24th, there had been, according to NATO, 2,000 people killed on all sides, and a couple of hundred thousand refugees. Well, that's bad, that's a humanitarian crisis, but unfortunately it's the kind you can find all over the world." "Shit happens" seems to be Chomsky's motto to excuse his insouciance about other people's suffering — if they had the misfortune to be killed by an inappropriate enemy.

Chomsky has a neo-imperialist position of his own, disdaining the views of the victims. That is why in Pristina there are streets named after Clinton and Blair, but you would probably have to go to Belgrade to find a Chomsky Boulevard.

Apologizing for Milosevic's crimes in Bosnia and Kosovo, Chomsky pontificates that "much more shocking are Williams' continued efforts to deny U.S.-UK crimes in East Timor." Since he so often refers me to his writings, I take the liberty of referring him to mine, where I have regularly raised the question of U.S. involvement both at the United Nations and elsewhere. In contrast to Chomsky, however, at no point did I assume that the crimes of the United States, whether in East Timor or in Cambodia, in any way excused or mitigated the crimes of the Indonesian military or the Khmer Rouge.

In his cynical employment of the tragedy of East Timor against international action to stop Milosevic, Chomsky disdains the views of East Timorese leader Jose Ramos-Horta, whom I frequently interviewed over the years of the Timorese struggle and who, in his politically impure concern for humanity, was at the time calling for intervention both in Kosovo and in his own country, precisely to redress the actions of previous American interventions.

This leads neatly to Chomsky's accusation that I do not understand "the difference between 'perpetrate' and 'precipitate.'" He really should quote General Wesley Clark less selectively. The general considered that he had good reason to believe that Milosevic was going to kill more Kosovars whatever the response, and wanted to stop him.

More to the point, Chomsky is once again evading the issue. A linguist should know better. I can indeed tell the difference between perpetrating and precipitating. His use of "precipitating" in this context is an outstanding example of the logical fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc: after this, so because of it. Hence, all the atrocities that followed the bombing are to be attributed to the bombing. Once again, he is faulty both in logic and in fact.

As Human Rights Watch reported about Serbian government actions in 1998, before the NATO attacks:

Some of the worst atrocities to date occurred in late September, as the government's offensive was coming to an end. On September 26, eighteen members of an extended family, mostly women, children, and elderly, were killed near the village of Donje Obrinje by men believed to be with the Serbian special police. Many of the victims had been shot in the head and showed signs of bodily mutilation. On the same day, thirteen ethnic Albanian men were executed in the nearby village of Golubovac by government forces...

The government offensive was an apparent attempt to crush civilian support for the rebels. Government forces attacked civilians, systematically destroyed towns, and forced thousands of people to flee their homes. One attack in August near Senik killed seventeen civilians who were hiding in the woods. The police were seen looting homes, destroying already abandoned villages, burning crops, and killing farm animals.

The majority of those killed and injured were civilians. At least 300,000 people were displaced, many of them women and children now living without shelter in the mountains and woods. In October, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) identified an estimated 35,000 of the displaced as particularly at risk of exposure to the elements. Most were too afraid to return to their homes due to the continued police presence.

And since Chomsky is so fond of the testimony of military men, perhaps he should refer to the testimony of General Naumann about the meeting he and Clark had with Milosevic when they were delivering the NATO ultimatum, and the latter looked forward to a "final solution" for the Kosovars, invoking the 1946 Drenica massacres, where, he obliging explained, "We got them all together and we shot them."

Equally unsustainably, and one might add, pointlessly, Chomsky avers that "the crimes in East Timor — carried out with decisive U,S,-UK support throughout — were vastly greater than anything charged in Bosnia, coming as close to authentic genocide as anything in the modern period."

While the professor blithely elides time to shape his polemic, the estimate total number of deaths in East Timor resulting from actions of the Indonesian army and its militia proxies in 1999 was 1,400 — around one tenth of Milosevic's butcher's bill in Kosovo the same year.

As for comparing East Timor and Bosnia, the truth and reconciliation commission in East Timor calculated that approximately 18,600 civilians were killed or disappeared between 1974 and 1999, 70% of them at the hands of the Indonesians and their surrogates. Additionally, at least 84,200 people died from hunger or disease resulting from the Indonesian occupation. The figure may be as high as 183,000.

In Bosnia at least 39,000 civilians were killed or disappeared between 1991 and 1995, 86% of them at the hands of the Serb forces. Additionally, over 57,000 soldiers died as a result of Milosevic's ambitions. These figures do not take into account people who died indirectly, of hunger or disease, as a result of the conflict.

The numbers cannot meaningfully be called "vastly" different, but the numbers do not affect the moral issue at stake. Mass murder is wrong — whoever commits it and regardless of the relative size. Those East Timorese did not die to make a rhetorical rod for ivory-tower polemicists to beat other victims. In Chomsky's ghoulish calculus, East Timor was worse than the Balkans, so failure to act and indeed even encouragement in the one precludes anyone acting to stop the other. This is a complete non sequitur.

Chomsky says that "it would have been outlandish" to raise that question of intervention in East Timor, and I did not do so." In fact, he did, in The New Military Humanism, where he complains that "no call has been heard from the New Humanists for withdrawal of Indonesian military forces or for sending a meaningful UN observer force." Indeed, he is doubly inaccurate, since there were many such calls, in response to which the Australians — with a fairly dire record of their own in East Timor — did intervene.

When I say that Clinton's role in East Timor deserves some "some grudging credit," Chomsky upgrades this measured assessment to unqualified "praise" for Clinton's termination of U.S. participation in the aggression and atrocities. He continues, "By Williams' logic, he should praise Russia for intervening in Afghanistan by withdrawing its troops in 1989." Well, yes, one does "praise" — or at least acknowledge something positive about — governments for doing the right thing eventually, even Clinton, whose reluctance to intervene in Rwanda and Bosnia caused untold suffering and whose public renunciation of ground force intervention in Kosovo at the beginning of the crisis did so much to hearten Milosevic. And yet Chomsky ignores my criticism of the bombing campaign as counterproductive, a function of Clinton's unwillingness to risk U.S. troops.

Chomsky persistently evades the issue of the direct responsibility of the regime in Belgrade for carrying out the massacres in Kosovo. In fact, he also evades the core issue that motivated the framers of the Responsibility to Protect: When faced with a recidivist regime massacring civilians, what is the appropriate response of the international community? The Genocide Convention, and indeed arguably the Apartheid Convention, both created a duty, a responsibility, for signatories to act, but they clearly were not enough (not least, admittedly, because of Anglo-American complicity in South Africa).

In my original article, I gave Chomsky credit for admitting — as so many of his acolytes have refused to do — Milosevic's murderous nature. But he still has not suggested how Milosevic's crimes might have been stopped, or indeed whether they should have been. Perhaps Chomsky imagines that he can evade his own responsibility with such Pilatean hand-washing. But every time he refuses to answer the question, his hands would in Macbeth's words "rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red."

Such a burden of responsibility kept Macbeth awake at night. I hope that Chomsky loses some sleep over it occasionally.

Senior Foreign Policy In Focus analyst Ian Williams is a journalist and author. Much of his work can be found on his blog, Deadline Pundit.

Chomsky takes Slobbo's Bait.

Response to Chomsky

this my response to Chomsky's unphilosophical screed in response to mine on R2P



Ian Williams | August 21, 2009

Editor: John Feffer

Foreign Policy In Focus
www.fpif.org

I am afraid that simply because Noam Chomsky makes an ex cathedra observation does not make it "uncontroversial" — not even when he hyperbolically accuses me of having "blood on my hands." He still defends his statement that "NATO air raids on Serbia [beginning March 24, 1999] actually precipitated the worst atrocities in Kosovo," and is surprised that I find this untrue — let alone morally unpalatable.

One hesitates to teach logic, let alone linguistics, to the distinguished professor, but his use of the world "precipitate" shifts the blame for the massacres and mass deportations that he admits took place from the actual perpetrators to those who were trying to stop them. (Incidentally, at the time Bogdan Denitch and I called for intervention but also condemned the form of intervention that President Clinton chose — high-level bombing.)

One can certainly accuse the West of neglecting the plight of the Kosovars, but it was Milosevic and his regime that deprived the Kosovars of their rights and then began to kill and deport them. It was that regime that had recently killed up to 8,000 Bosnians at Srebrenica, whose dismembered and reburied bodies are still being found. There was no NATO bombing to blame for that rather shameful inaction.

In fact, faced with that cold-blooded massacre, NATO leaders had every reason to fear the worst in Kosovo.

I would recommend that Chomsky read the judgment of the UN war crimes tribunal, after it had considered the evidence of 113 witnesses for the prosecution and 118 for the defense, not to mention tens of thousands of pages of documents submitted by both sides. It found five Serb officials guilty of the "criminal enterprise" that he attributes to NATO. It concludes that "the direct testimony from many witnesses demonstrates that the Kosovo Albanian population was fleeing from the actions of the forces of the FRY [Federal Republic of Yugoslavia] and Serbia, rather than the NATO bombing and the KLA."

For a flourish that should excite some indignation, the report added that "there is no doubt that a clandestine operation consisting of exhuming over 700 bodies originally buried in Kosovo and transferring them to Serbia proper took place during the NATO bombing" and adds that the "great majority of the corpses moved were victims of crime and civilians, including women and children."

In finding the Serbian officials guilty, the tribunal noted that "the NATO bombing provided an opportunity to the members of the joint criminal enterprise — an opportunity for which they had been waiting and for which they had prepared by moving additional forces to Kosovo and by the arming and disarming process described above — to deal a heavy blow to the KLA and to displace, both within and without Kosovo, enough Kosovo Albanians to change the ethnic balance. And now this could all be done with plausible deniability because it could be blamed not only upon the KLA, but upon NATO as well [italics mine]." The blame-shifting certainly seems to have worked with Chomsky, but the judges looked at the mass of evidence and decided to the contrary.

Chomsky betrays a persistent Manichaean worldview in which the United States is always the source of evil in the world. Even with that in mind he would surely like to reconsider his implied comparison of the United States with Nazis. ("It would be like raising the question of why Nazis didn't intervene to stop the slaughter of Jews by local forces in the regions they occupied.")

The United States is often, but not always wrong, and its enemies are sometimes, but not always right. The United States was certainly wrong in East Timor, and indeed in the near contemporary situation in Western Sahara, and I have been reporting on those injustices for many decades. Along with the other members of the Security Council the United States had a clear duty to intervene to assert international law. In the absence of effective international (i.e., U.S.) intervention, the Indonesian military would have been every bit as brutal and aggressive.

We could deplore this intervention as much as we like, but I fail to see what was going to stop Indonesia's brutality otherwise. Indeed, Chomsky points out that it was Clinton's intervention that persuaded the Indonesian general's that the game was up in East Timor. Yes it was long overdue, but it was an American intervention, which deserves some grudging credit. Also, by delegating U.S. forces to the UN on the Macedonian border, the United States successfully prevented yet another former Yugoslav republic being sucked into Milosevic's bloodstained mire. There are hundreds of thousands of dead Rwandans who would have welcomed a U.S. intervention there.

However, Chomsky takes an absolutist position on intervention in principle, which would have had him picketing the Normandy beaches to stop the war against German workers.

The United States is culpable in many ways over East Timor, but that should not detract from the primary role of the Indonesian government and military. Nor should any person of ethics try to shield the Milosevic regime from its unique culpability for events in Srebrenica and Kosovo. Chomsky's quasi-theological conception of the United States as the supreme evil power tends to exonerate the less evil powers, turning Ariel Sharon, the Indonesian generals, Milosevic, and the others into mere secondary agents. Meanwhile, condemning in principle any effective action to stop these malign actors actually lends them aid and comfort — while doing nothing for their victims.

Senior Foreign Policy In Focus analyst Ian Williams is a journalist and author. Much of his work can be found on his blog, Deadline Pundit.

PInter Bitter

Pinter bitter
We remember Harold Pinter as a brilliant writer of dialogue. But as a political agitator he was sometimes tone-deaf

o Ian Williams
o guardian.co.uk, Friday 26 December 2008 19.00 GMT

Harold Pinter, playwright and militant pacifist, was a vivid testimony as to why poets should indeed remain unacknowledged as legislators of the world. Epitaphed everywhere as the playwright of pauses and silences, like many pacifists he remained noisily silent about what should happen in the real world.

For example, one would expect the author of Mountain Language, on the repression of the Kurds, to show similar empathy towards the Kosovars, a small mountain people whom Milosevic was expelling, to have offered some constructive alternatives to Nato action, even if he quite rightly opposed Bill Clinton's chosen method of high-level bombing. His pacifism inhibited him from advocating the one method that actually worked – the threat of a ground invasion, which eventually led to Milosevic running up the white flag immediately.

Pinter's intemperate attacks on the Western European countries that decided on action to protect the Kosovars made him seem an ally of the murderous tyrant in Belgrade – an impression he gave even more substance when he joined the "International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic", as the Serb leader, overthrown by his own people, awaited trial in The Hague. That did not sit well with his declaration in his earlier letter to the Guardian that "Milosevic is undoubtedly ruthless and savage." Indeed, even as Pinter passed away, a Serb court was trying Serb militiamen for their part in murdering a Kosovar family.

It is the traditional poetic pacifist dilemma, highly visible in Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke, which implies blame for the second world war and the Holocaust on the warmongers Roosevelt and Churchill while in some measure exonerating those more directly responsible. Orwell said of Gandhi that he did "did not take the sterile and dishonest line of pretending that in every war both sides are exactly the same and it makes no difference who wins."

But, as Orwell also pointed out, all too often Manichaean pacifists assume reflexively that their own governments are worse than those their opponents'. "Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval, but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States."

However, that is not to detract from Pinter's dramatic achievements, merely to separate his direct political pronouncements from his playwrighting, which was all the better for being more subtly imbued with his political sensibilities. Indeed, he was quite right in his overall assessment of Clinton and Blair, and indeed the broad parameters of US policy. But the Kosovars whom he claimed would suffer "disastrous consequences" from Nato's actions now understandably name streets and buildings after Clinton and Blair, not Pinter and Milosevic

If he had put the subtle pauses and timing in his political pronouncements that he did in his plays, it would have been a considerable step forward.

Crocodile Tears in the North of Kosovo

Guardian Comment is Free 20 March 2008

History teaches that there is nothing so sanctimonious as a heavily armed victim - and that lots of gulls will be prepared to accept a bully's spurious claims to victimhood if the latter shouts loud enough. Bullies do tend to have big mouths.

It was difficult to keep a straight face upon hearing Moscow and Belgrade's pious invocations to Nato and the UN not to be provocative. Serbia's foreign minister Vuk Jeremic protested to UN secretary-general Ban Ki Moon over what he described as "unacceptable and excessive violence". So it was of course the Balkan equivalent of poltergeists who bulldozed and burnt the border posts, threw stones, Molotov cocktails and grenades and fired automatic weapons at UN police and KFOR troops. They killed a Ukrainian police officer.

Of course, one could put this in the context of a robust tradition of public demonstration, but I rather suspect that if this were a mob of Kosovars surrounding the Serbian government offices in Pristina, Belgrade and Moscow would be condemning the supine response of the peacekeepers!

Then we see repeated over and over again the line that those occupying the court house in Mitrovica simply wanted their jobs back. That invokes sympathy anywhere in the world. But there are the technical details - they have actually been on Belgrade's payroll since 1999 and refused to apply for, let alone take, jobs with the court system run by the UN under Security Council Resolution 1244.

Belgrade's sudden attachment to every jot and tittle of 1244 overlooks its exhortations to Kosovar Serbs not to cooperate with UNMIK for the last decade.

In fact, let us peel back the onion another tear-jerking layer. The Serbs in the Mitrovica court almost certainly took up their jobs a decade earlier, when Slobodan Milosevic dissolved Kosovo's local government and instituted effective apartheid there by firing the Albanian Kosovars and replacing them with ethnic Serbs. Since then, they and others are actually paid much higher salaries than they would get in Belgrade in order to persuade them to stay.

One cannot help but suspect that many of the rioters are in fact on the payroll, and some of their belligerence derives from wanting to stay that way.

However, shooting at Nato is not clever. In my experience, the French peacekeepers, for example, tended to sympathise with the Serbs, and certainly made no attempt to stop Serb mobs' ethnic cleansing of Albanians from the north of Kosovo in the early days, even if they did escort the expellees to safety. Certainly when I crossed the bridge across the Ibar, they made it plain that I was on my own if the Serb "bridgewatchers" took umbrage.

But grenades and gunshots tend to solidify issues. KFOR is likely to be a lot less patient in the event of future attacks. The sad thing is that the Serbs in Mitrovica are being used, indeed abused, by the nationalists in Belgrade who almost certainly hope to provoke Kosovar riots against the remaining Serbs in Kosovo. It would allow politicians to posture as perpetual victims, quite reckless of the cost already paid by Serbs in Krajna and Bosnia for their gesture politics.

Disappointingly for the nationalists, the Kosovars have, surprisingly, been a model of restraint, with the Serbs in the south seemingly safe and secure, albeit unhappy about the change of regime. There is an opportunity for reconciliation and a strong Serb presence in a future Kosovo that some Serbs realise is worth grasping.

But not in Belgrade. At least in South Africa significant sections of the white community took an important part in dismantling apartheid and apologising for it. Few of the Serb nationalist politicians and their dupes demonstrating in Mitrovica think there was anything wrong with disenfranchising the majority population of Kosovo for a decade and then driving them out at bayonet point with massacres to gee them along.

Indeed, one of the braver Serbs in Belgrade recently took note of what passes for regret in nationalist circles - a lament that Belgrade had not implemented a final solution, involving getting rid of all the Albanians from Kosovo after it had first occupied it.

Victims need not be saints, but bullies' victimhood is more likely to be comeuppance. People who throw hand grenades in glasshouses should not be surprised if the roof falls in on them. Sadly the glass will not fall on the real instigators in Belgrade.

Kosovo Duet..

Strategic Dialogue: Kosovo

Ian Williams and Stephen Zunes | February 29, 2008

Editor: John Feffer


Foreign Policy In Focus
www.fpif.org

Was the United States too hasty in recognizing the new state of Kosovo? Ian Williams and Stephen Zunes have different takes in this strategic dialogue. To see the original essays, follow these links to Williams and Zunes.
Ian Williams

Stephen Zunes is quite right to point out the inconsistencies of U.S. policy in the Balkans, which has been fairly consistently wrong! Beginning when James Baker declared that the United States had no dog in the fight in the Balkans. Contrary to what some far leftists claim, U.S. policy in the beginning depended on keeping Yugoslavia together even though it was clear that Milosevic's power grab had effectively dissolved the fragile federation. Once Slovenia declared independence, that was the end.

The United States and the European Union (EU), and indeed Russia in its various avatars, should have laid down the rules and effectively supervised the Yugoslav successor states. Guaranteeing boundaries and rights for minorities, establishing dual or even common citizenship, were all possibilities that could have ensured a soft landing for the wreck of Tito's enterprise.

The hands-off U.S. policy in effect removed the only threat that would have curbed Milosevic's excesses. Left to their own devices, the Europeans failed badly. Both Britain tacitly and France overtly, acted on the principle that the Serbs would win, and if it were done, then best t’were done quickly.

When the United States did intervene, it quickly produced results. Richard Holbrooke, the architect of the Dayton Accords that produced an agreement among the warring factions in Bosnia, emulated Kissinger in realpolitik. Honoring promises to Milosevic, the Republika Srpska was effectively rewarded for successful ethnic cleansing, which encouraged Milosevic.

But while the State Department maintained close back-channel relations with Rugova's shadow administration in Kosovo, bringing him and other leading figures to meet opinion formers, it was back-burner as well as back channel. One thing was clear: whenever Milosevic saw a clear and present danger of intervention, he backed down. But U.S. and Western policy was consistently unclear.

We should not exclude Russia from this. Russian diplomats at the time of the Kosovo crisis told me that what the Serbs were doing was unconscionable, but effectively the United States was not consulting them, and was being arrogant. This was true, but did not make Moscow's role much more moral or constructive.

Clinton then fatally refused even to consider UN authorization for intervention, for fear of a Russian veto, and refused to take the issue to the General Assembly, where he would have won support. He then began the campaign by effectively ruling out the one option that Milosevic feared: a ground invasion. Instead, Clinton launched a bombing campaign, which was all the more foolish for being conducted from on high to avoid the political embarrassment of American casualties abroad. (The now-interventionist Republicans were then quite the opposite of course). The mounting "collateral damage" allowed Milosevic to crawl to the moral high ground in some quarters. Notably, the day that NATO decided on a ground invasion, Milosevic ran up the white flag and pulled out of Kosovo – as he would have done months earlier if he had seen a real threat of ground attack.

The UN trusteeship of Kosovo has not been an unmitigated success. Despite the efforts of some, the mission was colonial and condescending to the Albanians, and in my experience, many of the UN staff had no appreciation for what had happened to the Kosovars earlier. It is difficult to know what Washington could do at the end of a trail of so many mistakes. Mostly, constructive engagement with Moscow may have averted the latter's amoral and expedient support for Serbian nationalism.

Insofar as I disagree with Stephen Zunes at all, it is over American responsibility for the declaration of independence and for the nature of the Serb governments since Zoran Djindjic's assassination. They have been much more center-right than center-left and are strongly nationalistic.

That is why the United States was once again reacting rather than initiating events. The Kosovars were determined, and gave Thaci's government a popular mandate to declare independence. The Kosovars were calling the shots. The trade-off with the United States and EU was to postpone the declaration from last year until now, after the elections in Belgrade, in return for recognition.

Looking back in history, and indeed at the Serb mobs and gangs at the border now acting with the same quasi-governmental backing that the paramilitary murder squads had a decade before, recognition and NATO back-up were essential to stop yet another Balkan War from breaking out. The Czech/Slovak dissolution could serve as a model here. But that presupposes realism and democracy on both sides. Every action the Belgrade government took showed the taint of old-style Balkan nationalism. And it showed no appreciation, let alone contrition, for what so many of its citizens had perpetrated back in 1999.

Negotiation is fine, but there comes a point when it is delaying the inevitable and keeping the wound open. That point was reached last year. Russia could make a precedent out of it for its various adventures in the near-abroad, in Moldova and Georgia, but it would be very foolish to do so. Chechnya and many other autonomous republics inside the Russian Federation would be delighted to cite it right back at them. Moscow would be better to join the EU chorus of how Kosovo is a one off.
Stephen Zunes

I have little fundamental disagreement with Ian William’s response to my article or in his original article, but I would like to challenge him on a couple of minor points.

My interpretation of what led to the end of the fighting in 1999 was not the threat of a NATO ground invasion, which was fraught with dangers and the prospects of which produced serious internal divisions within the alliance. Nor did Milosevic “run up the white flag.” Instead, it appears that it was the United States and NATO that were also forced to compromise due to the failure of the 11-week bombing campaign to coerce the Serbs to give in. If one looks at the original U.S./NATO proposal at Rambouillet and the counter-proposal presented by the Serbian parliament immediately thereafter, and then compares both of them with the text of the final cease-fire agreement, the agreement that ended the fighting pretty much splits the difference, perhaps even coming a tad closer to the Serb position. In other words, the United States and NATO had to compromise at least as much as did Milosevic. This raises the possibility that the Western nations could have worked out a similar deal without the tragic decision to go to war, a war that not only resulted in enormous human, economic, and environmental damage to Serbia, but led to Serbian repression in Kosovo that escalated dramatically into full-scale ethnic cleansing.

The Serbs agreed to the ceasefire on the condition that while Kosovo’s autonomous status and right to self-government would be restored, the province would not be allowed to secede. Indeed, UN Security Council resolution 1244 (1999), while calling for “substantial autonomy and meaningful self-administration for Kosovo,” also reaffirmed “the commitment of all Member States to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the other States of the region.” It is not surprising, therefore, that the Serbs feel betrayed by the international community.

I certainly agree with Kosovo’s right to independence on a moral level, for reasons spelled out in Ian’s original article. It would have been better, however, to have pressured the Kosovars to put off their declaration until after Serbia’s entrance into the European Union (and provide whatever combination of pressure on and assistance to the Serbian government to make that happen sooner rather than later.) When a country becomes part of the EU, national boundaries and what constitutes an independent nation-state become far less significant. Supporting Kosovo’s secession beforehand, however, has strengthened hard-line nationalists in both Serbia and Kosovo and will likely delay both nations’ integration into Europe.

Finally, I would have been thrilled if the United States had recognized an independent Kosovo a decade ago, when the Serbs were led by the autocratic and militaristic Milosevic and the Kosovar Albanians were led by the pacifist and democratic Rugova. Today, however, the roles are partly reversed, with Serbia led by democratic moderates, Kosovo led by national chauvinists, and the Kosovar Serbs being subjected to attacks and (small-scale) ethnic cleansing by Kosovar Albanians. Most of the Serbs governing in Belgrade today, while strongly nationalistic, were not responsible for and in most cases were strongly opposed to Milosevic’s brutal repression of Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian majority. Indeed, they supported – and, in some cases, participated in – the nonviolent democratic revolution in October of 2000 that ousted Milosevic. With Kosovo’s secession having been recognized by the United States and other key Western states on their watch, however, these democrats will likely get the blame for having “lost” Kosovo. This will thereby create the conditions for a comeback by some of the hard-line Serbian nationalists responsible for the innumerable war crimes of the 1990s.

Ian Williams contributes frequently to Foreign Policy In Focus (www.fpif.org) on UN and international affairs. More of his work is available on www.deadlinepundit.blogspot.com. Stephen Zunes is a professor of politics and international studies at the University of San Francisco. and a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus (www.fpif.org). From 1996 to 1999, he served as chair of the board of Peaceworkers, a U.S.-based group supporting the nonviolent struggle of the Kosovar Albanians and other nonviolent movements and peacemakers in areas of conflict.


For More Information

Ian Williams, "A New Kosovo" (Washington, DC: Foreign Policy In Focus, February 20, 2008).

Stephen Zunes, "Kosovo and the Politics of Recognition" (Washington, DC: Foreign Policy In Focus, February 21, 2008).

Accept the Reality of Kosovo Independence

I will be on KPFA Monday morning 0705 LA Time on Kosovo but in the meantime, the latest production from the connect to reality production line.

From Tribune, 22 February
Accept the Reality of Kosovo Independence

THE bluster about the illegality of Kosovo independence begs some questions. If you want legality, perhaps someone should ask Moscow to point out the United Nations resolution that gave the Russian Federation the former Soviet Union’s permanent seat and veto on the Security Council. There isn’t one. Sometimes people find it best to accept reality.

In contrast, now that Kosovo has declared its independence, we can expect many people, including so-called socialists, to discover a sudden attachment to international law. Most of them were not such devoted defenders of it when Slobodan Milosevic was defying 50 UN resolutions and committing the crimes against humanity for which he eventually ended up on trial in The Hague.

With the same insouciance that Palme Dutt once dismissed Stalin’s crimes as “spots on the sun”, apologists for Milosevic overlook or dismiss the thousands of Kosovars killed by his regime when it was expelling almost a million Kosovars. In their own language, it is perhaps “no coincidence” that, for some tankies,the Kosovars were indiscrete in their choice of allies. They were supported reluctantly by Bill Clinton and forcibly by European democratic socialists, while their murderers had Moscow’s blessing.

In the course of this sun-spotting, one frequent claim was that “only” 2,000 were killed. In fact, double that number of slaughtered had already been unearthed. Since then, hundreds more have been discovered whose rotting bodies were carried in refrigerated trucks to be disposed of in Serbia. Proportional to the population of Kosovo, “only” 2,000 would the equivalent of 60,000 victims in Britain. Multiply by at least three and you realise why Kosovars refuse to be re-integrated into a Serbia whose leaders have yet to seriously admit that their forces did anything wrong.

Any rational point of view would suggest that such atrocities by Belgrade extinguished any residual claim of sovereignty over or loyalty from the Kosovars. When, in 1971, the Pakistani army staged mass killings and rapes of the Bengalis in East Pakistan, and foolishly took on India, it lost and Bangladesh seceded. Bangladesh became a member of the Commonwealth, recognised by almost 90 countries, and a member of many of the subsidiary bodies even before its first application – supported by Moscow – to join the UN became the occasion off Beijing’s first veto. In the end, reality triumphed. China and Pakistan dropped the veto in 1974.

When one hears so-called socialists denying the right to self-determination to a people, claiming that they are Jihadists or Islamo-fascists and asserting the right of Serbia to the land they live in because of ancient monasteries there, one can only wonder why they don’t rush off and join the church. In fact, not only are many Kosovars, Catholic and Orthodox, refreshingly few of them are very religious at all – as any visit to a Pristina café to drink the potent local raki would soon demonstrate.

There are some very bad Kosovars, and on the body count across the Balkans, in absolute terms there are even more murderous Serbs. But self-determination applies to all people, not just those whose morals we approve of. Kosovo does risk being a dysfunctional state, with a limited economy, a severe crime and smuggling problem, undeveloped institutions and a flourishing gangster class. That puts it on a par with about half the membership of the UN. Indeed, looking at the wars that Belgrade has visited on its neighbours, the black-marketing and profiteering that Milosevic made the bedrock of its economy, its failure to reform its security apparatus to the extent of arresting war criminals, one might question Serbia’s credentials for independence. At least Kosovo insists on EU supervision of its administration.

No one has produced any reasonable plan to show how, without massive repression, Serbia is to re-assert its sovereignty over a country, 90 per cent of whose population does not want it. One parallel would be a government in London deciding to hold on to Scotland by military force, despite a clear vote by the majority of its population for independence. And perhaps a closer parallel would be London deciding to take back Ireland based on a much longer political history of continuous sovereignty than Serbia can demonstrate over Kosovo. This is more about Serbian politicians pandering to the nationalist vote at home – which is where Milosevic began the road to Kosovar independence in 1989, when he withdrew the province’s autonomy.

Russia’s support for Serbia also smacks of playing the nationalist card at home. And the EU could steal its ace by telling the US to forget the plans for positioning radars and missiles in Poland and the Czech Republic in return for a more mature attitude from Moscow.

Serbia’s rulers should be told firmly but politely that when they stop posturing over the “illegality” of Kosovar independence and attend to the genuine illegality of harbouring mass murderers wanted in The Hague, they will have a bright future in an EU which has made formerly fortified frontiers administrative boundaries, and which has guaranteed minorities unprecedented rights.

A New Kosovo -FPIF

A new Kosovo
Amid the joy of long-delayed self-determination, Kosovars face serious obstacles. Serbia and its Russian ally continue to oppose independence.
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
By Ian Williams
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Someone should erect a monument in Pristina to Slobodan Miloševic as the godfather of the new country. If he had not abolished Kosovar autonomy, practiced a form of apartheid for a decade, and rounded it off with a brutal episode of ethnic cleansing and mass murder, Kosovo would not likely have declared independence on February 17. Nor would its European neighbors and indeed so many of the most important countries of the world have recognized its independence so promptly.

Amid the joy of long-delayed self-determination, Kosovars face serious obstacles. Serbia and its Russian ally continue to oppose independence. There are some lingering doubts in certain European capitals and the new state has some persistent political and economic dysfunctions. But Kosovar independence is now a reality, and the international community will soon get used to it.

Serbian Arguments

Supporters of Serbia have objected to Kosovar independence on many grounds – often contradictory. Perhaps the most contradictory has been Belgrade's newfound attachment to international law. Both Moscow and Belgrade can make a limited case in international law with respect to sovereignty. But neither in recent history has been scrupulous about respecting boundaries or over-scrupulous concerning the sovereignty of their neighbors.

Indeed, neither country has shown the slightest contrition for Miloševic's crimes against international humanitarian law and their active or tacit support for them. There is a ghoulish form of revisionism among Serb nationalists and their supporters that either totally denies or downplays the murder of thousands of Kosovars, many of whose rotting corpses were later excavated and removed to destroy the evidence. Belgrade's forces drove almost a million Kosovars across the borders and out of their homes.

The Serb nationalist claim to Kosovo on historical grounds is not likely to get far in any international tribunal, Israeli fanatics’ claims from Moses notwithstanding. It is a sort of diplomatic neutron bomb that claims the land and disposes of the people. Belgrade's supporters have failed to explain how Serbia would in any way exercise effective sovereignty over an overwhelmingly hostile population, whose recalcitrance has, if anything, been reinforced by the Serbian leader's intransigence. A close parallel would be London deciding to take back Ireland based on a much longer political history of continuous sovereignty than Serbia can demonstrate over Kosovo.

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Self-determination has been one of the bedrock principles of modern times, strongly emphasized by the International Court of Justice in its ruling over Western Sahara. Various Balkan nations, including the Serbs, invoked that right earlier against the Ottoman Empire.

Bangladeshi Precedent

Any rational point of view would suggest that such atrocities by Belgrade extinguish any residual claim of sovereignty over or loyalty from the Kosovars. There is in fact a recent example, which could indicate the direction that the international community will take.

Pakistan was originally formed by the voluntary union of what is now Bangladesh and what is now left of the country in the West. You may note that, in contrast, no one asked the Kosovars about their incorporation into Serbia in 1912, or at any time since. When in 1971 the Pakistani army staged mass killings and rapes of the Bengalis in East Pakistan, and foolishly took on India, it lost and Bangladesh seceded. Bangladesh became a member of the Commonwealth, recognized by almost 90 countries. It joined many of the UN’s subsidiary bodies even before its first application to join the UN became the occasion of Beijing’s first veto, since the PRC and Pakistan were close allies against India and the USSR. In the end, reality triumphed, and China and Pakistan dropped the veto in 1974.

UN Role

When the Security Council passed Resolution 1244 in 1999, which put Kosovo under interim UN administration, Miloševic’s regime was already under UN sanctions and had been the subject of over 50 UN Security Council Resolutions and innumerable statements. The Council unanimously set up an International Tribunal to try the perpetrators of what they agreed had been egregious war crimes. Only months before NATO's bombing of Serbia, the Security Council endorsed Miloševic’s agreement to reduce troop numbers in Kosovo – and to stop killing and expelling Kosovars. He broke the agreement and the UN resolution.

In fact, Security Council resolution 1244, despite its tendency to bury the facts under diplomatic verbiage, pointed firmly at independence. Its purpose was to legalize NATO’s victorious intervention while saving Moscow’s feelings. The UN was charged with setting up an autonomous administration and holding democratic elections in Kosovo, "pending a final settlement," which would help in developing "substantial autonomy and self government." The resolution’s small print refers to the Rambouillet accords, which were sold to the Albanians on the basis of an implied promise of a referendum after three years. Kosovo’s independence had to wait an additional five years.

New Challenges

Some critics of Kosovar independence point out that the country risks being a dysfunctional state, with a limited economy, a severe crime and smuggling problem, and undeveloped institutions. That puts it on a par with about half the membership of the UN! Consider the wars that Belgrade has visited on its neighbors, the black-marketing and profiteering that Miloševic made the bedrock of the Serbian economy, the assassination of the most democratically minded prime minister Zoran Djindic, and its failure to reform its security apparatus to the extent of arresting war criminals. Yet no one calls into question Serbia’s right to be a state.

A more serious problem concerns ethnic minorities. Many Serbs in Kosovo were complicit in the persecution of their Albanian neighbors. Some, but not many, stood up for them. When the tables turned, many Serbs fled, expecting to be paid in like coin. Many Kosovars saw it as payback time. Some stood against it, but not many. There can be no justification for the attacks on Serbs that some Albanians have perpetrated. But those who now so strongly emphasize what happened to the Serb minority in Kosovo forget that such attacks have been the work of individuals, while what happened to the Kosovar Albanians before was the work of the organized forces of the state. Nonetheless it is very wise of Kosovo to accept the plan of UN Special Envoy Marrti Ahtisaari, which allows for years of tutelage to help build institutions and protect minorities.
It is reassuring that the declaration of independence specifically calls for friendship with Serbia "with whom we have deep historical, commercial and social ties that we seek to develop further in the near future." Indeed, the very fact that the declaration refers to Kosovo, instead of “Kosova,” is a step forward from the early days when Albanians tried to insist on using the latter, as the Albanian spelling.

Recognition of Kosovar independence has started with the United States and most of the European Union. Most Islamic countries will probably follow suit, along with many non-aligned states. So far Belgrade has blustered and threatened to downgrade relations with the dozens of very important neighbors who will recognize Kosovo. But after the multiple defeats that Miloševic caused for Serbs, fortunately there is little appetite for military action.

European Future?

But whatever the atavistic pan-Orthodox pan-Slavic ties invoked between Belgrade and Moscow, Serbia needs better relations with the EU, whose members and associates surround it. Selling former state assets to Russian companies at knockdown prices may give vengeful satisfaction to anti-Western politicians in Belgrade, but Serbia's economic future is with Europe.

Not only is the EU much more generous than Russia with funds, it has been extremely successful in making old boundaries obsolete and transforming fortified frontiers into administrative divisions. Less noticed has been the EU’s advancement of the rights of minorities, both in its original and aspirant members. Both should blunt the more atavistic forms of nationalism that still haunt the Balkans.

Brussels should indeed wave its juiciest carrots at Belgrade. However, the Netherlands and Belgium have, quite rightly, stopped the EU from offering Serbia an accession package unless it fulfils its own promises and its legal commitments to hand over indicted war criminals, notably Mladic and Karadjic, to The Hague. Until they do, Miloševic's undemocratic and criminal coterie will still control Serbia's security forces. It would be like admitting Turkey without provisions for freedom of the press and rights for Kurds and other minorities there.

For both the EU and the United States, firmness but respect should be the formula for re-establishing relations with both Moscow and Belgrade. It would be a good gesture, for example, for the United States to abandon the provocative anti-missile and radar stations on Russia's door-step in Poland and the Czech Republic. Without condoning Putin's moves to authoritarianism, the United States and EU should treat Moscow as a partner rather than an undercover enemy. As the Europeans point out, Kosovo is a special case. Any attempt by Moscow to generalize it to Abkhazia or Trans-Dneister could have serious blowback in Chechnya, for example.

During the Balkan wars, Moscow became progressively more intransigent in its support for Serbia. Partly this derived from pan-Orthodox sentiment. But Moscow also liked the idea of using the threat of its veto to try to get some respect from a disdainful Washington, whose denizens persisted in treating it as a defeated power In the best-case scenario, neither Serbia nor Russia will be able to use the politics of resentment to prevent Kosovo from entering the community of states.


Ian Williams contributes frequently to Foreign Policy In Focus (www.fpif.org) on UN and international affairs. More of his work is available on www.deadlinepundit.blogspot.com. Published by Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF), a project of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS, online at www.ips-dc.org). Copyright © 2008, Institute for Policy Studies.

Kosovar Independence & East Pakistan

Kosovar Independence and East Pakistan

Serbia's self-defeating posture

This was in Guardian Comment is Free while I was travelling and attracted some 260 traditionall splenetic comments. Go and enjoy them!

Serbia's self-defeating posture
Independence for Kosovo is going to happen, despite Belgrade's strenuous objections
Ian Williams

All Ian Williams articles
About Webfeeds December 15, 2007 6:00 PM | Printable version
One of the peculiarities of Balkan politics is how leaders have photographic memories for events that took place centuries ago, but total amnesia about what happened recently. On the face of it, Belgrade's offer of almost complete autonomy as long as Kosovo and the rest of the world accept Serb sovereignty seems, if somewhat dottily obsessive, eminently placatory. But the essential claim that Kosovo is theirs because a Serb prince lost a battle to the Turks there 700 years ago, is a bit like the British claiming France because of Dunkirk.

In recent reality, the Kosovar Albanians have seen what use Serb nationalists have made of such residual claims: from Slobodan Milosevic's dissolution of Kosovo's autonomy and imposition of apartheid on Albanians there to his pogroms and ethnic cleansing just before the Nato intervention (which a Russian diplomat at the time described to me as "absolutely insupportable", before in effect going on to support it).

For better or worse (frankly mostly for worse) most post-second world war dissolutions have followed established provincial or state boundaries, without too much regard for local feeling. Those who talk about taking away the "Serbian" areas north of Mitrovica again tend to amnesia.

Those are areas that were ethnically cleansed of Albanians in 1999 and stayed that way with the connivance of the French foreign legion who stopped Albanians going across the bridge where the bridge watchers from the Dolce Vita café waited to assault any who dared.

When I went I had a UN press pass, so they could not stop me, but assured me that they would not lift a finger if I were assaulted. In fact I had a good time and good coffee in the café and gave a radio interview to the local Serb station, telling them that, notwithstanding the legion, they should get used to it - UN security council resolution 1244 meant that this area was lost to Serbia.

As was clear at the time, the resolution implied eventual self-determination for Kosovo but tried to save Russian face by deciding "that a political solution to the Kosovo crisis shall be based on the general principles in annex 1 and as further elaborated in the principles and other required elements in annex 2", which in turn referred to the Rambouillet accords.

Those accords, which incidentally precluded partition, were hazed in another level of ambiguity, promising that within three years "an international meeting" would "determine a mechanism for a final settlement for Kosovo, on the basis of the will of the people, opinions of relevant authorities, each party's efforts regarding the implementation of this agreement and the Helsinki final act", which the Americans induced the KLA to sign on to by promising that it meant there would be a referendum.

After Rambouillet of course, Milosevic, assuming that with Sarajevo and Srebrenica behind him he was a modern day Achilles impenetrable to western weapons, went ahead with his ethnic cleansing and was overthrown after his defeat.

The old spiritual about Noah had a line about animals who went up two by two into the ark: "Said the ant to the elephant, 'who are you shovin'?" It came to mind at the self-deluding bluster from Belgrade about Kosovo, where successive nationalist worthies have warned of the terrible consequences of European acceptance of Kosovar independence - Serbia may not join the EU. Brussels is doubtless quaking with fear.

Even more preposterous is the military threat. Kostunica did not disagree with Milosevic for starting wars with his neighbours but for losing them. He has no intention of taking on the Kosovars, let alone Nato. The bellicose Serb nationalist militias would not be confronting and killing unarmed civilians this time.

Serbia and Russia are quoting the sanctity of security council resolutions. They would have been better off reading 1244 before they signed it to save Milosevic from the ground invasion that would have finished him off immediately.

If the leaders in Belgrade, not to mention Moscow, really cared about the Serbs in Kosovo, they would stop posturing about the fig leaf of Serb sovereignty and work to ensure the maximum EU, Nato and UN presence in a Kosovo under probationary independence. The genuine victimhood of Kosovar Albanians does not make them saints, any more than the crimes that some of them commit against the remaining Serbs mitigates Milosevic's deeds against them.

The best future in the region is for everyone to join the EU with its freedom of movement and shared citizenship.

Independence is going to happen, and Belgrade's threat to cut off diplomatic relations with the rest of Europe and the USA will have somewhat less effect than a declaration of war by the Duchy of Grand Fenwick.

In Whose Name?

Why are English speakers almost uniquely subject to inverted nominal imperialism? Why do we allow others to dictate what names we give to other places?

Born in Liverpool of mostly Welsh ancestry, I was chuffed, as we used to say, rather than miffed, to discover that the Welsh name for the city was Lerpwl. (Although that did not impress the Welsh nationalists, who objected to plans to hold the 2007 Eisteddfod toga party there.) Cockneys react with indifference to the French saying they live in Londres, and most New Yorkers do not worry too much that their city is Nueva Yorca to many of its inhabitants.

Russians do not worry that Moskva is Moscow, let alone that Americans call it Mos-COW and the Brits Mos-COE. Deutschlanders do not give an oompah that we call them Germans, or the French call them Allemandes. People have languages and the proper nouns are part of it.

So who does the Burmese junta think they are telling us that we must use Myanmar, with the added indignity that most Burmese do not want the name? Why did we all slavishly let a bunch of murderous thugs force us to rebrand Cambodia as Kampuchea? Why have been allowing the stronger Greek nationalists (sorry, the people from Hellas) to tell us what name to use for Macedonia?

Why shouldn't Britain bristle at the temerity of the French calling part of their country Brittany? In fact, to give it a sense of perspective, Great Britain was called so simply because Grand Bretagne was bigger than Bretagne in France.

In India, local sentiment insists that Bombay is now Mumbai, Madras is Chennai, and Calcutta now Kolkata, for three cities that were essentially developed (admittedly exploitatively and imperialistically) by the British. One notes with approval that the Bombay Stock Exchange holds firm, and I've yet to see an Indian restaurant serving Mumbai Duck, while no one calls the capital Dili. And the Hindi for India is Bharat but the government of India happily uses the English even though it does mention Bharat in the constitution.

In fact, all my local Chinese restaurants serve (excellent) Peking Duck, but we are supposed to call the capital of China (not Zhongguo) Beijing. But one notices that Hong Kong keeps its English form, although Canton became Guangzhou - where people still speak Cantonese and do not call their city that, since it is the Mandarin name.

Adopting the Chinese roman letter spelling is even more bizarre. The letters mean different things. "X" in English does not represent "Hs" anymore than "Q" signifies "ch".

When a nationalist Turkish business spent some millions trying to get everyone to call his country Turkiye, the campaign soon foundered like a dead duck. That's the way it should be. When I was teaching journalism in Pristina, the Kosovar students bridled because the UN referred to the place as Kosovo instead of "Kosova." I pointed out that we called Shqiperia, Albania, and no one seemed to mind. Kosovo is the English name for the place.

Unlike the Romans who gave the world Latin and everyone who used it wrote nice things about Rome, a great thing about English as a doubly imperial language is that it has been so useful for anti-imperialists for everything from telling phrases, long treatises and quick slogans. Think of Jawaharlal Nehru's "tryst with destiny".

On the other hand, sometimes they are about as grammatical as Brian's slogan writing on the walls of Jerusalem, (aka Al Quds or Yerushalayim) in the Monty Python film, but that is the other great thing about it, is that there is no English academy to force spellings, definitions and purifications on its multifarious speakers.

So I don't mind if the speakers of Indian English want to say Mumbai, as long as they extend the same democratic linguistic privileges to others to keep on calling it Bombay. Non-English speakers can be as nationalist as they like - in their own languages. And I hope that Burma is free soon.

Nominal Imperialism

Guardian Comment is Free on the use and abuse of foreign names in English.

Bombs, Bombast and Balkans, not to mention Boutros!

seee my latest on bombs, bombast and the Balkans in Comment-is Free in the Guardian
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/ian_williams/2007/06/bodies_bombast_and_bombs_in_th.html

Genocide or Mass Murder?

My latest Comment is Free in the Guardian just up is on the increasing distractions of genocide from the core principle. Mass Murder Wrong, whatever you call it!

Kosovo, Kouchner and Killing Field Fans

Seven years ago, I interviewed Bernard Kouchner in Pristina. I reproduce this story because it is now doubly, indeed triply relevant. Word is that Sarkozy is appointing Kouchner as Foreign Minister, which will be, to say the least interesting times in the Quai D'Orsay and elsewhere. Secondly, Kosovar independence is in the news, and finally the subject of humanitarian intervention makes some leftists fervent fans and apologists for genocide.

Here it goes.

http://www.ft.com The Financial Times (London) September 15 2000

Maverick Viceroy By Ian Williams

In the summer of 1999, there was only one restaurant open in the chaos of Pristina - a pizzeria. I suggested to Bernard Kouchner that even his many critics had to admit that dining out in Kosovo had improved immeasurably during his year as the United Nation's viceroy there.
He liked my title for him, but of the innumerable bars and restaurants opened by the Albanians returning after their deportation, he could only say: "The cuisine is still not good - nor the service."
So did the "special representative of the secretary general" feel secure, sitting in the open, shaded portion of parkland sequestrated by the Pristina Park Hotel for its outdoor restaurant?
"No, my guards are over there. You know, I don't want to die. They have been going to the bathroom with me for a year now. This is not a relaxed job."
Even so, the waiters were unimpressed; we signalled vainly for attention.
While we waited, we discussed Kouchner's transformation from manning the barricades of Paris in 1968 to his becoming almost absolute ruler of a Balkan province. His period as French health minister in the Jospin government made him a respectable choice when UN Secretary General Kofi Annan needed someone to cope with the pressures of Kosovo.
Kouchner sees no inconsistencies along his career path. "This is a huge step forward for international society because we protected the minority across the borders of a state.
"Think of East Timor. We waited and demonstrated for 20 years. Now, the right to intervene is a real right. As internationalists, our generation, we have done well. After Auschwitz, after Cambodia, we did it. It was the century of genocide, and now we have found the way to protect minorities. A tribunal is fine, but it is always too late to prevent the crimes."
He jumps about in his seat with a physical agility that matches his mental agility. "When I set up Medecins Sans Frontie`res, I never considered that the humanitarian world was so different from the political; they were different aspects of the same thing. To protect people from murder, is it political or humanitarian? When the boat people were dying in the China Sea, which was it? We have to take humanitarian intervention step by step.
"It was impossible 10 years ago to think of confronting the Yugoslav army. But the intervention is still a success. It is a change in the old international diplomacy, based on sovereignty."
At last a waiter deigns to take notice. Fish dominates the menu. Since it is a long drive to the coast from landlocked Kosovo, he insists on seeing the product. The waiter brings a tray, and Kouchner pokes the contents suspiciously with his finger.
"It is fresh?" he demands, before deciding on Levruga ("sea wolf", according to the translation in the menu). Not wanting to be caught ruling a country under the influence of alcohol, we choose mineral water. Expecting a long wait, we sip the water and chew on the local bread, dipped in olive oil.
"It is good to have fish," he says. "They eat meat three times a day here." I agree - even a carnivore can be daunted by "cattle soup" on local menus.
Kouchner is small and looks younger than his 60 years. Some people who deal with him often complain of arrogance, but anyone who knows the UN bureaucracy accepts that it took someone of his strength of character to break the rules. Resolution 1244, which set up his administration, repeats the fiction of Yugoslav sovereignty and most UN bureaucrats would have taken it very seriously.
"Yes, I took it very seriously - in my own way." He smiles. "It was very important, but . . ."
His train of thought is derailed as he pitches forward. The plastic garden chairs we are using are not strong enough to cope with his hyperactivity.
He picks himself up and continues: "Yes, states are absolutely sovereign, and we have to respect their sovereignty - when the state is respectable, when it is respectful of its minorities. When they are killing their own people, they are not respectable."
And as for the UN: "We are in charge of a state. It was impossible to refer issues to New York to the legal department, to the political department. When I went to New York the second time I was very rude - 'I don't want you to advise me,' I said, banging the table. 'I will only talk to the secretary general'.
"It helped that Kofi backed me up. He knew what he was doing; he was very clever. We had lunch on the 38th floor of the UN and he told me: 'I did not choose you because you were the most disciplined player.' So I said, 'OK, you're not disappointed then?' "
His defiance of bureaucratic caution led him to rescind Belgrade's apartheid-style legislation, open a new Kosovo postal service, make the D-mark Kosovo's currency, and put customs officials at the borders.
Most Security Council members appreciate the achievements. Others complain: "The Chinese, not so much, but the Russians write a lot of letters," he comments, adding laconically: "We used to reply."
By now the fish has arrived, tastefully displayed on a large plate with a few basic vegetables. With an air of pleasant surprise, hebrandishes a first forkful. "It's good, isn't it?"
It is.
I ask whether Kosovo will ever be part of Serbia again. He pauses,and has a rare lapse into tactful diplomacy. "Let us say, they willnever come back to the former situation, and I will do the maximum for them. Substantial autonomy must be set up; I believe that despite the fact that I favour independence, this step-by-step way is the only way."
The revenge killings of Serbs led many cynics to conclude that the intervention and his reign in Kosovo is a failure. This is not his first encounter with the unpleasantness of the interface between aspirationand reality.
"What about the Kurds? We protected those stupid bastards there! Barzani and Talibani and so on. Exactly the same thing! I spent months and months working in the hospital. I met them again afterwards, when they started killing each other by the thousands. I was really disgusted."
That starts another line of thought. "But now we are the only obstacle between the Albanians and independence. In a few months they may consider us an enemy."
Wasn't he disappointed at the continuing murders?
Once again realism triumphed. "If you wanted to choose a good example for humanitarian intervention, you wouldn't choose Kosovo. Here the victims are not angels, they are Albanians - very, very tough, with a tradition of revenge and mafia. And then we discovered that, hidden by the threatened minority, there was another minority to be protected.
"But do you believe the Rwandese were very good people? They were not! You cannot choose whom you're supposed to help. The only rule is to be on the side of the victim."
At this point, the hotel decides to pipe the local radio station through its PA system. "Stop that bloody radio!" he bellows, more as an irate customer than an angry potentate.
He has found his year in Pristina, "very tiring, very frustrating, and very interesting. The people around me are fantastic, they are militants, not UN diplomats. Highly engaged, concerned and devoted. But then it is frustrating, because the situation is frustrating, the UN resolution is frustrating."
Now, he is ready to move on - but not until after the local elections he has scheduled for next month.
"I am not a rabbit or a rat to run in front of the boot," he declares.
He has been mentioned as a possible replacement for Sadaka Ogata as UN high commissioner for refugees. "It's a good job," he admits. "If I were in charge, I would transform it. I would look to prevention, I would not be waiting at the border for the refugees so that we could put them in camps. Here, I would apply the right to interfere."
I provoke him with some recent statements from the UNHCR on the need to maintain a distinction between "internally displaced persons" and legal "refugees" who have crossed borders. He rises to the bait.
"That's ridiculous - an IDP is exactly the same for me. All because of the sovereignty of the state. It is the same fight," he declares, and repeats: "The fish is good, eh?" as he finishes, leaving only the bones and head on the plate.
An hour later than scheduled, we drive away with his armed escort to Government House, where he holds court in the former Serbian headquarters. Kouchner is an interventionist at heart and, in the modern world, that means courting the media.

Sublime Intervention!

Here's the full text: check the Guardian Comment is Free to see the Care in the Commentary it evoked.

Sublime intervention
It is difficult for some people to accept that sometimes countries do a good deed because it is actually the right thing to do.

Ian Williams

Those who make a fetish of opposition to "liberal interventionism" would have probably defended the slave trade.

As sundry public figures engage in "we are sorrier than you are" competitions about the slave trade to commemorate the 200th anniversary of its abolition in the British empire, it is worth looking at the significance of what followed. It was perhaps the first clear example of humanitarian intervention in modern history.

At the height of a war for survival with Napoleon - who was incidentally fighting bloody wars in the Caribbean to reintroduce slavery to Martinique and Guadeloupe - popular pressure forced the Royal Navy to send ships to West Africa to set up the anti-slavery patrol.

The Royal Navy, which incurred heavy casualties from disease, spent decades trying to suppress the trade, within the constraints of international law, and with varying degrees of active resistance from the French, Americans, Spanish and Portuguese. This happened despite the sugar and slavery lobby in parliament, and even though the British government at home was one of the most repressive ever - think of the Peterloo Massacre in 1919.

Tony Blair devalued the concept of "humanitarian intervention" with his retrospective invocation of it to justify the invasion of Iraq.

But that is no excuse for the anti-Samaritans of the so-called left who sneer at "liberal interventionism" as if there was something shameful at wanting to stop mass mayhem against people in foreign countries.

It is a difficult idea for some people to accept that sometimes people and countries do good deeds - like fight against the slave trade - because it is the right thing to do.

Looking at some of the guff we still see about the intervention over Kosovo, for example, I can imagine some of our current wannabe commissars' reaction if they had been around in 1807. They would have denounced the anti-slavery patrol as imperialist intervention in west African kingdoms' sovereign affairs. They would have denied that anyone died in the trade, or maybe excused the trade as a necessary step to economic development and questioned the motives of the anti-slave trade movement, filled as it was with protestant evangelists.

In fact, the modern concept of humanitarian intervention was invoked when Saddam Hussein was attacking Kurdistan after the Gulf war. When I asked the UN legal department at the time what the legal basis was, they muttered that Hitler had invoked it to invade Czechoslovakia, citing maltreatment of the Sudeten Germans. It was easy to see that, as precedents went, this one was not going far.

It was probably Blair's abuse of the concept in Iraq that led to the international commission set up by the Canadian government to rename it "the responsibility to protect", which was adopted by the UN in 2005.

Their formulation took account of the possibilities for expediency inherent in the idea.

The commission stressed that the international community - not a self-selected state - should only override state sovereignty to stop continuing or anticipated killing. It should be clear that the operations had a real chance of success and would not make things worse. Despite Blair's invocation of humanitarian reasons, his invasion of Iraq failed on almost every test of the principles - while Kosovo passed most of them.

Although the Kosovo intervention was tainted by Clinton's refusal to let it go to the UN, the support of every country in western Europe went some way to meeting that principle - and when the Russians tried to raise the issue, they were trounced in the voting. Darfur would clearly pass most of them - except for the UN security council mandate, and even there, a quarter of the diplomatic effort expended on rounding up a posse against Iran would surely get a resolution against Sudan.

Humanitarian intervention is like brain surgery: sometimes essential, but only to be used as a very last resort, and then only in the most careful way. Progress is slow. Two hundred years after the British attempt to outlaw the slave trade, the Jinjaweed are riding with impunity. But I hope it's not for much longer.

When it comes to damming rivers of blood, I would rather be a sneered at as a liberal interventionist than be a Leninist Pontius Pilate washing his hands of mass murder anywhere else in the world, defending the "sovereignty" of any mass murderer who happens to claim to be anti-imperialist.

Sublime Intervention!

In my latest Guardian Comment is Free,
I argue that some of the Leninoid anti-Interventionists would have opposed Royal Navy patrols agaisnt the slave trade two hundred years ago.
Feel free to join in the resulting scrum at http://tinyurl.com/35akth

Kosovan Indendence, get used to it guys

Check out the comment is free article for a study in ethnic pathology. I hope you will note that at no point in my article do I suggest collective Serb guilt for the atrocities committed in Kosovo. It was the government of Milosevic, and the Serb nationalists who were responsible. But most of the angry Serbs seem to assume that the Albanians collectively are guilty of everything done by any one of them. Blood guilt is the technical term. Albanians are crooks, illegal immigrants, nun-rapers, and have no riight to self determination. And of course, they are all also Islamic terrorists which is why they are not acccused of being drunkards I suppose despite the gallons of raki they regularly down.

If the Serb nationalists had said similar things about blacks or Jews, in most countries they would face prosecution for hate crime and in some for holocaust denial... sadly, in Belgrade they get elected to high office instead and complain that no one loves them.


No more on Kosovo
It's time to stop pandering to Serbian nationalists and give them a reality check.

Ian Williams

February 9, 2007 3:00 PM
In 2005, the UN heads of state summit accepted contemporary humanitarian standards of international law and accepted the "Responsibility to Protect", a doctrine which says that international humanitarian law trumps claims to state sovereignty. In effect, it takes up those words from the Declaration of Human Rights and says that sovereignty is a contract between a people and their state, and a state that massacres and mistreats its own people has broken that contract.

King George III tried to make the American colonists pay some taxes to fund the war that Britain had just fought to get the French out of North America.

The American response was that "when in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."

One would have thought that opinions of mankind should know the causes impelling Kosovo's independence fairly well. The ten years of apartheid that Slobodan Milosevic's regime practiced upon the ethnically Albanian Kosovars, after he dissolved their government in 1989, followed by the intense attempt at ethnic cleansing in 1999 should make it fairly plain that the "political bands" had been stretched beyond breaking point.

It is clear that Milosevic's behaviour effectively renounced any claims to loyalty from and justified sovereignty over the vast majority of Kosovars. Instead, Serb nationalists were left with more traditional claims to sovereignty: Serbia conquered Kosovo just before the First World War.

Of course after Milosevic's overthrow, the Serbs could have said they are really sorry for what happened, and offered to make amends. They did not. Serb nationalist leaders blustered and tried to demonize their victims - although, to give them a bit of credit, they were forced to prosecute some of the perpetrators of mass murders in Kosovo when over a thousand semi-rotten Albanian cadavers turned up buried under police stations in Serbia and from under lakes where truckloads of them had been dunked. The post-mortem cleansing had been intended to remove the evidence of atrocities.

But while Zoran Djindic hoped that revealing the mass graves would help raise support in Serbia for extraditing Milosevic, the temporary enthusiasm of the Serbian security forces for apprehending war criminals rapidly returned to its normal low ebb. It took several years for the Belgrade authorities to identify the DNA and return the corpses to Kosovo, but as gestures go, returning the fetid evidence without too much in the way of returning indictments does not really send a strong signal of contrition.

So far, this is all Belgrade has done to woo Kosovo's Albanian majoirty. Instead, the nationalists have been posturing, running a referendum to declare that Kosovo is an inalienable and integral part of Serbia, while trying to detach the area north of Mitrovica, from which the Albanians were ethnically cleansed, and incorporate it into Serbia.

Amusingly, there was no attempt get the citizenry of Kosovo to vote in this referendum. It has about the same strength as a British referendum declaring the13 colonies to be an integral part of the United Kingdom. Which is to say, none.

It is time to stop pandering and give the nationalists a reality check. Because the international community came to the rescue of the Kosovars when Milosevic was killing them, it has earned the right to ensure the welfare of other minorities there. But, supervised or not, Kosovan independence is the only way forward. And then the Serbs and Kosovars can join the EU and concentrate on getting the Balkans working and making the frontiers there as irrelevant as they are in the rest of Europe. If the nationalists in Belgrade want to bluster and break off relations with their neighbours, the EU and the US, let them.