|
Kosovo:
the First to Get it Right
By JONATHAN
POWER
April 5, 2000
LONDON- What an anniversary that was! The first
birthday marking Nato's bombing of Yugoslavia brought
forth a torrent of articles both pro and against. Yet not
one came close to matching for lucidity and
perceptiveness, delivered in an icily ironic style, the
essay penned at the time of the war by the former Swedish
prime minister, Carl Bildt, in the cerebral British
monthly, Prospect. Bildt, who is presently the UN
Secretary-General's Special Envoy for the Balkans, is a
man of political leanings, if elections are anything to
go by, too far to the right for most of his countrymen.
His instinct is to support Nato, to be close to America,
to wind back the welfare state and to argue the case for
the use of force and intervention. But something happened
to him on the road to Belgrade.
"The Baby Bombers", as the editor headlined the piece,
was a wake-up call for the baby-boomers, now in the
higher reaches of western political power, "who have
never learnt about war and power the hard way" and who,
with their "smart wars- high rhetoric, high altitude and
high technology; smart bombs for smart politicians",
believe there is a "third way in war". Bildt wrote of
meeting Gerd Schmueckle, a retired German general who was
wounded six times on the Russian front during the Second
World war, but then served in the highest positions
inside Nato. Perhaps, said the general, it is a question
of generations. While the war veterans are losing their
hair and teeth, the new generation suddenly has a
different attitude towards war.
"For Schmueckle, war was associated with horror beyond
imagination, leaving deep psychological scars on
individuals and nations. Bombs, he said, do not create
peace; instead they breed hatred for years, perhaps for
generations."
A year on we can see the truth of this in Yugoslavia.
The bombing did not forestall ethnic cleansing, it
appeared to precipitate it. And it has bequeathed a
cauldron of mutual hatred and a political potage that no
amount of Nato and UN policing and Western economic aid
can clear up, even if it were forthcoming in something
like the quantities promised- another example of the war
time rhetoric that misled the public. Reading the public
statements of Bernard Kouchner, the UN man responsible
for the reconstruction of Kosovo and General Klaus
Reinhardt, the local Nato commander, is to sense that
they are often close to despair.
Aficionados of Carl Bildt now have the chance to
pursue his thinking, one year after the bombing, in the
new issue of Survival, the quarterly journal of the
International Institute for Strategic Studies. This is a
much more lengthy discourse on the limits of force, and
looks not just at Kosovo but at Bosnia before. It's
essense is to challenge what has now achieved the status
of conventional wisdom- the idea of the supremacy of
air-power.
Bildt argues that the Dayton agreement that brought an
end to the fighting in Bosnia was "far more a victory for
diplomacy than a victory for force". He certainly doesn't
exclude that the Nato air operation, initiated on
September 30th, 1995, "had a significant psychological
impact during its first few days", but the political
momentum that led to the accord came about primarily
because of a new diplomatic approach. "The essential
diplomatic innovation was the willingness of the U.S. to
accept some of the core demands of the Bosnian Serbs;
demands that the U.S. previously had refused even to
contemplate. In particular the Bosnian Serbs had
consistently demanded a separate Republika Srpska inside
a weak Bosnian framework".
After Dayton there was an unforgivable lull in Western
diplomatic activity. Neither the European Union nor the
U.S. were willing to launch any serious diplomatic
initiatives to head off the brewing crisis in Kosovo.
Albanian opinion inside Kosovo, once more fluid and open
to diplomatic options, was allowed to harden, leading to
the birth of an armed insurrection and driving the
population into the embrace of the Kosovo Liberation
Army.
The West, misreading the lesson of Bosnia, tried to
head off Serbian repression with the threat of air power.
Thus when diplomacy failed- and the Rambouillet agreement
demanded much more from Slobodan Milosevic than the
"peace agreement" which ended the war- the West had
little choice but to make good on its threats.
The air operation, however, could not prevent a major
humanitarian disaster. Whether it triggered it, Bildt
more cautious than I, just says "will remain a subject of
debate". But he adds scathingly, "despite all the talk
about a revolution in military affairs, Kosovo brutally
demonstrated that the axe remains the superior
short-range-precision-guided weapon when it comes to one
man killing another; there is very little that
increasingly long-range and high tech weaponry can do
about it."
A year on we have to live with the now seemingly
insoluble Kosovo problem handed over to the UN, to the
world. Poor old rest of the world. (That was its reward
for kicking up a fuss about the UN Charter being abused
by the West's unilateral decision to bomb.) The UN is
supposed to find the peace that Western bombs could not
deliver, even though, in Bildt's view, "there is no
agreed framework for either the internal or external
order of Kosovo."
What the West needs if it is to progress, never mind
Kosovo, and grow out of its baby-bomber lifestyle, is a
little less Bill Clinton and Tony Blair and rather more
Carl Bildt. His two essays should be their compulsory
reading before, once again in some new imbroglio, they
are tempted by the quick but elusive fix of air
power.
I can be reached by phone +44 385 351172 and e-mail:
JonatPower@aol.com
Copyright © 2000 By JONATHAN POWER
Tell a friend about this article
Send to:
From:
Message and your name
 
|