“Kosovo: A Test for NATO”
I. Introduction
It is an honor to be with you today. This has been a momentous week for American foreign policy. I don’t know how else to say it. To the surprise of many, NATO for the first time has taken offensive action to deter ethnic cleansing in Kosovo.
When the Council asked me to speak about two months ago, I looked at the calendar, and saw that the NATO summit was coming, and that we would just have welcomed three new members into the alliance.
This would be an opportune time to talk about the future of NATO — the challenges, the adjustments, the costs. In particular, I planned to talk about the importance and the difficulty of keeping NATO united on Kosovo. Kosovo was a big test.
After this week, I think NATO has passed that test, at least the first phase. But there are more hurdles ahead for NATO in Kosovo. NATO has to see this crisis through. By that I mean - either get a verifiable agreement that the “cleansing” will stop or render Milosevic incapable of of continuing the repression.
There’s something of an irony here. Most Americans will not consider NATO a 21st century alliance if it cannot deal effectively with a crisis in Kosovo, its own backyard. But it’s also true that most Americans probably don’t understand what happened in Kosovo or what’s at stake. NATO has to make the case.
II. History of the conflict
Why are we bombing Kosovo? There is a two-word answer: Slobodan Milosevic. He has massed more than 40,000 troops on the border of kosovo and has launched scorched-earth attacks on the Kosovo Liberation Army and ethnic Albanian civilians within the province.
His goal was once and for all to drive thousands of Kosovars from the province of Kosovo before NATO could intervene.
He may be trying to create an Albanian-free zone in northern Kosovo in preparation for a partition of the province. We just don’t know his exact intentions, other than he’ll do anything to stay in power.
But to really understand the crisis, we have to go back further — six hundred years in fact – to 1389, on a place called Blackbirds’ Field, near present-day Pristina. There, medieval Serbian knights were defeated by the Ottoman Turks. This led to five centuries of Turkish domination of most of the Balkans — and the Serbs have been trying to undo that humiliation ever since.
But there’s a problem: ethnic Albanians also claim Kosovo as their own. They trace their roots there even farther back than can the south Slavs.
And, in 1974, when all of all of Yugoslavia was united under Marshal Tito, the communist dictator, the Kosovar Albanians were granted autonomy within the republic of Serbia. The Albanians were allowed local control, while border security and foreign relations remained in the control of Belgrade.
Over the next fifteen years the Serb population in Kosovo dropped from one quarter to less than one-tenth. Why? There was a higher birth rate among the Kosovar Albanians; “buy-outs” of many Serbian homesteads by Kosovars; the desire of many Serbs to move to the more prosperous Serbia proper; there was some harassment of Serbs by Kosovars — although nothing approaching the “ethnic cleansing” that is now being carried out by the Serbs.
With Tito’s death, Yugoslavia began to fall apart. In Serbia an ambitious young politician named Milosevic engineered a coup against the communist leadership. He had ambitions beyond Serbia proper: he sought to extend his power to Serb-inhabited regions of Yugoslavia outside of Serbia.
In 1989, on the six hundredth anniversary of the Serbs’ historic defeat, Milosovic traveled to Blackbirds’ Field and delivered a nationalist speech.
He promised that no Serb would ever again be pushed around. With communism gone as a cause, Milosevic had found a new route to power: rabid nationalism and ethnic hatred.
That same year, Milosevic revoked Kosovo’s autonomy. The following year the parliament and government of Kosovo were abolished.
A purge of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo followed. Thousands were fired from their civil service jobs, and the Serbian government cut off funding to the basic institutions of society.
How did the Kosovars react to these violations of their human and civil rights? Peacefully at first: the Kosovars set up a parallel, unofficial system of governance — schools, hospitals, and the other basic institutions. Under Dr. Ibrahim Rugova’s leadership, they held to a policy of non-violence for nearly seven years.
I do not know of any other example anywhere of such self-restraint in recent years. Only later did they become radicalized.
It’s amazing what happens to people when their homes are burned, their children are executed before their eyes, and they are forced to flee into the mountains.
III. Recent events
The United States was not totally ignoring Milosevic. In December, 1992, President George Bush sent a warning — the so-called “Christmas Warning”. In a letter delivered Milosevic and the commander of the Yugoslav army, Bush said that the United States was prepared to intervene militarily if Serbia attacked the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.
Perhaps because of this “Christmas Warning,” Milosevic refrained for four years from an all-out military assault on the Kosovars, content to use repression instead.
The Kosovars waited in vain for the west to help. They hoped their cause would be on the agenda at the Dayton peace negotiations in November 1995, but at the insistence of Milosevic, the talks were restricted to Bosnia and Herzegovina.
By 1996, armed Kosovar resistance began under the loosely organized Kosovo Liberation Army.
Milosevic saw an opportunity. To divert the Serbian people’s attention from the massive failure of his authoritarian communist regime, he undertook the systematic campaign against the KLA, in the process seeking to drive the ethnic Albanian population out of large areas of Kosovo.
Until this week, the west took note of these atrocities but could not deter them. The United Nations Security Council has passed two important resolutions — numbers 1160 and 1199 (1998), decrying the repression and calling for an end to them. Milosevic publicly agreed to the U.N. demands, and then continued his terrorism.
Last October, under threats of NATO military action, Holbrooke and Milosevic reached agreement on a plan to end the massacres and move toward an interim agreement on the future status of Kosovo.
A ceasefire was to take effect, monitored by unarmed NATO aircraft, and international compliance verifiers were to be allowed into Kosovo.
But Milosevic treated this agreement as a “scrap of paper.” The Yugoslav government flagrantly violated it.
Rather than the twelve thousand five hundred regular army troops, and the six thousand five hundred special police called for — a total of nineteen thousand — they stationed forty thousand Yugoslav soldiers and Serbian special police in the province.
As for the ceasefire — it very quickly became a total joke. But Milosevic allowed the international observers in. So we have a documented, ongoing pattern of warfare, both against units of the Kosovo liberation army, but especially against innocent Kosovar civilians.
The most widely publicized massacre was perpetrated by the Serbs on January 15, 1999 in the village of Racak. There, forty-five Kosovar Albanian civilians were slaughtered. The Serbs, of course, asserted that they were KLA fighters who had either been killed in combat or had been shot while fleeing.
But a Finnish-led team of forensic experts examined the bodies and concluded that most of the victims had been forced to kneel and had then been executed by small-arms fire.
Another massacre occurred this week in the village of Srbica.
And during the past ten days the Yugoslav army and the Serbian special police have gone on the offensive, seizing the high ground above roads and railroads, moving in their most modern weaponry including M-72 and M-84 tanks, and conducting search and destroy missions against Kosovar villages suspected of harboring KLA sympathizers.
The net result is a new flood of refugees now approaching the four hundred fifty thousand reached last fall. To date approximately two thousand Kosovar Albanian and Serbian civilians have been killed so far in the conflict.
IV. What have been the results?
More than four hundred thousand Kosovar Albanians have been driven from their homes, including tens of thousands during the past ten days. Thousands of homes in hundreds of villages in Kosovo have been razed to the ground.
One-quarter of Kosovo’s livestock has been slaughtered, and ten percent of its arable land burned. A food blockade has been imposed upon large segments of its population.
Back in October, immediately after the agreement between Ambassador Holbrooke and Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic was made public, I said: “We must never again allow racist thugs like Milosevic to carry out their outrages while the alliance dawdles.” It took several months, with more massacres and more refugees, but NATO is no longer dawdling.
V. What’s at stake
Yet there is still a great unease in Washington, and around the United States, about NATO’s action. Why should we care if Kosovo burns? Explaining this operation is itself an important test for NATO, and for U.S. foreign policy.
We are a European power. Since the end of World War II, our strategy has been to promote stability in Europe through the spread of democracy. For fifty years NATO has been the umbrella under which our European allies have survived and prospered.
Since the end of the cold war, we have extended this zone of stability eastward. We enlarged NATO. NATO entered into partnerships with many countries in the region. Over time, these countries may even join NATO. But in the short-run we have formed productive relationships with Russia and others in the region.
This policy has helped move several countries toward real democracy and toward healing their own domestic ethnic tensions.
Finally, we have determined to oppose the aggressive policies of demagogues who are trying to stir up ethnic and religious hatred. Milosevic is such a demagogue, and if his scorched-earth “ethnic cleansing” is allowed to continue, the result will be greater instability in this part of Europe. I believe the national interests of the United States and other NATO members are directly threatened by actions of the Yugoslav government in Kosovo.
Let me be more specific about the dangers we face. This is the Balkans, an area that already has spawned one world war in this century. There is little doubt that continued ethnic cleansing of ethnic Albanians by the Serb interior ministry special police and the Yugoslav army will create thousands — if not hundreds of thousands — of refugees.
We saw that last fall when about four hundred fifty thousand Kosovars were displaced from their homes and forced to flee. These people are called “displaced persons,” not “refugees,” because they have stayed within the boundaries of their own country, even if they are hiding in the mountains.
No one believes they would stay in Kosovo indefinitely if the Serbs are allowed to continue their murderous rampage. They would logically conclude that the west has given Milosevic carte blanche to do what he wants with “his Albanians.”
So they’ll head for the borders, and the Serbs will be only too happy to let them leave. After all, the whole point of this vile “ethnic cleansing” is to get the Serbs into a majority position in Kosovo’s population.
Thousands of Kosovars will cross into Albania and Macedonia, and some will undoubtedly cross into Montenegro. To an extent, these refugee movements have already occurred.
But what happens if it becomes a flood across the borders?
Macedonia, the only former Yugoslav republic that seceded peacefully, has a highly unstable ethnic mix: two-thirds Macedonian slavs, nearly one-third ethnic Albanians, plus a smattering of other groups. The ethnic Albanians do not feel like fully-empowered citizens. Their language is not officially recognized. Few ethnic Albanians serve in the Macedonian civil service or military.
Last fall, however, a young, conservative Macedonian political leader named Georgievski was elected prime minister, and he has reached out to the ethnic Albanians, including some of their most assertive leaders in his coalition government.
But if thousands of desperate, radicalized Kosovars stream over the border into Macedonia, the delicate ethnic balanced will probably be tipped.
Despite the good intentions of the new Macedonian government, violence would likely result.
The picture gets worse. Many observers believe that Turkey would not stand idly by if fellow Muslims are being persecuted in Macedonia.
If the Turks intervened, the Greeks, who border on Macedonia and have a long involvement there, would surely counter the Turks and attempt to protect the slavic Christians. We would have the nightmare — averted only narrowly several times in the last few decades — of two NATO allies fighting each other.
If this sounds far-fetched, one need only read the history of the bloody ethnic violence in Macedonia over the past hundred years.
Then there is Albania. It is the poorest country in Europe. It has a per capita gross domestic product about one-twentieth that of the wealthiest western European countries.
During riots that erupted two years ago, armories were plundered, and hundreds of thousands of AK-47 assault rifles wound up on the street. As a result, Albanian society is lawless. The central government has only nominal control in many parts of the country, especially in northern Albania, which borders on Kosovo.
If the KLA is expelled from Kosovo, northern Albania would become their prime staging area. This would increase the risk of raids on the KLA by Serbs crossing into Albania. That’s a much more dangerous situation than we have today.
Moreover, a wave of Kosovar refugees into Albania would probably induce many Albanians to flee to Italy across the Adriatic. This has happened before, and it destabilized Italian domestic politics much the way the Haitian refugees in Florida affected our own.
Once in Italy, refugees could travel freely, and undoubtedly they would head north in search of jobs — but unemployment is already a problem in Europe.
If the countries of the European Union — the bastion of democracy and our most important investment and trading partners — suffer economically, it will hit Americans where it hurts: in their wallets.
About one-third of our economy now depends on exports. So if wealthy west Europeans bear the costs of sheltering refugees from the Kosovo conflict — or the cost of sending them back — and must pay more unemployment compensation to their own workers who have lost jobs to refugees willing to work for next-to-nothing, these Europeans will be less able to buy our products. It’s that simple.
If Albania is destabilized, its Greek minority could suffer discrimination. The Albanian Greeks have demanded more cultural autonomy in the past, and very modest progress has been made.
If that progress were reversed — or if there were attacks on the ethnic Greeks who are slightly better off than the ethnic Albanians — there could be a response from the government of Greece. Then Turkey might intervene, precipitating a conflict between two NATO allies.
Then there is Montenegro, the junior partner with Serbia in what is left of Yugoslavia. It’s a mountainous place of six hundred thousand hardy souls. Not a likely place to accomplish a democratic and economic turn-around, but that’s exactly what has been going on there. Their young president, Milo Djukanovic, whom I met a few years ago, is a former communist youth leader who now runs a democratic government with representation from all ethnic groups — the slavic Orthodox Christians, the Albanians, and the Slavic Muslims. Moreover, he has privatized the economy. Djukanovic is now seen by Milosevic as a serious potential threat within Yugoslavia.
If the Serbs are allowed to continue their rampage in Kosovo, Milosevic would could easily be tempted to attack Montenegro in an effort to unseat Djukanovic. This is not far-fetched. This is a very real danger.
There is also the “demonstration effect” of allowing Milosevic to conduct his ethnic cleansing with impunity. Let me note just a few of the quarrels that could quickly heat up if tyrants elsewhere thought they could get away with persecuting their own minorities.
About nine percent of Romania’s population is ethnic Hungarian. Largely thanks to its desire to join NATO, the Romanian government has reached an accommodation with the Hungarians, but a right-wing party still is spouting ethnic hatred. If the social and economic situation in the area deteriorates, these radicals could gain influence. Slovakia has a large Hungarian minority in the south. Past antagonisms persist and tensions could escalate in Slovakia if the Serbs get away with their ethnic cleansing in Kosovo.
Ukraine has an ethnic Russian population approaching one-fifth of the total. The situation has not polarized along ethnic lines except in the Crimea, but unbridled ultra-nationalism in Serbia could stir people up, especially with Ukraine’s economic troubles.
Neighboring Bulgaria is also trying valiantly to reform. Its government reversed the 1980s communist persecution of the ethnic Turkish minority. But organized crime is a cancer in the body-politic. Refugees, ethnic cleansing, and a destabilization of Macedonia — which many Bulgarians consider to be a part of Bulgaria anyway — could wreck the reforms in Bulgaria.
Let me be very clear: none of these potential crises, taken alone, would directly threaten the United States. But the history of this century has shown that in a relatively short time the kinds of instability I have described could carry a higher cost than the current air strikes. “Pay now, or pay more later.”
But let me ask you–what will we have left our children and grandchildren if we allow one man to begin to reverse the process of unification and stability that has been underway for the past 54 years? At the cost of billions of U.S. dollars and the stationing of thousands of American troops?
Finally, there is the question of NATO’s credibility, and American credibility as NATO’s leader. NATO has already identified ethnic and religious quarrels as the greatest danger facing the alliance.
In addition, NATO has already warned Milosevic many, many times not to continue his bloody repression in Kosovo.
If NATO hadn’t acted this week, its viability would have been questioned, and properly so.
And if NATO begins to lose its rationale for being, the entire European security architecture that the United States has painstakingly built over the last five decades will be at risk.
VI. Conclusion
The situation in the Balkans is complex and fraught with danger. I do not know how the NATO operation will turn out. No one knows. There are no guarantees in foreign policy, especially in the post-Cold War era.
But I believe the president and our NATO allies made the right decision. American interests are too intertwined with Europe to let instability spread. The risks of not acting outweigh the risks of action. But it will be weeks, perhaps months, before we know how this crisis will turn out.