Simon Jenkins, the Times:
June 11 1999 OPINION
Milosevic stays in power and Kosovo is in ruins - so who has won?
A victory for cowards
The half war is over. Now begins the half peace. The deal signed on Wednesday between Nato and Yugoslavia proves, if proof were needed, that Nato could impose its will on Yugoslavia only by threatening to invade. After three months of dithering and destruction, that point has finally been made.
The imposition does not end now. It starts. The Serbs have not "surrendered". They are staging a tactical withdrawal, in bad faith, from ground that they have not conceded in battle. Their sovereignty over Kosovo is recognised by Nato, which is pledged to protect the province's Serb minority. Since every Serb village is armed to the teeth, the phrase "total Serb withdrawal" is ambiguous, as is the commitment of the Kosovo Liberation Army to disarm. For Nato now to claim power over the province and then stand by as 100,000 Serbs are driven from their homes would make this an empty intervention. Nor is there any deal on the 10,000 Russian troops heading for Kosovo, committed to protecting the Serbs. All we have today is some Serb units retreating, the bombing stopped and foreign troops about to advance into Kosovo. Nato is now feasting on Balkan fudge.
All this was predicted two months ago as the most likely outcome of the bombing campaign. Unless and until he faced Nato forces on the ground, Mr Milosevic could continue to lay waste 90 per cent of ethnic Albanian territory. He has now done this. He has secured a pledge that the United Nations will police the KLA and guard the Serb enclaves. He has had his sovereignty over Kosovo recognised, and no truck with referendums. These are no mean achievements for a leader who, four years ago, was facing downfall. Like Saddam Hussein the man is a monster, but all the silly puffing and ranting and bombast from British politicians will not make him step down. For British ministers to proclaim a victory in Kosovo they must not only rebuild it and secure the return of refugees. They must preside over the establishment, with Serb agreement, of peaceful autonomy in Pristina followed by a Nato withdrawal. This at present seems sheer fantasy.
The monarchs of spin are already claiming "the bombing did it". Not so. Such a fiction may suit the military-industrial complex, but fiction it is. The bombing of Yugoslavia failed in both its overt and its covert objectives. It did not halt ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, as George Robertson, the British Defence Secretary, constantly claims. It did not force Mr Milosevic to change his mind, let alone in "days not weeks". It did not kill him. It did not topple him. The bombing may have weakened the capacity of the Yugoslav Army to resist a Nato land invasion, but that invasion was specifically ruled out when the bombing was launched. The aerial assault on civil targets in Belgrade, Novi Sad and Nis suggested to the world that Nato was led by careless bullies whose "humanitarian" concern was for their own soldiers, not the evicted Kosovans or those killed and maimed by the bombs. So wild was the bombing that ministers found themselves having to call journalists, make-up girls, hospital staff and even whole villages "legitimate targets of war", blithely rewriting the Geneva Convention to suit themselves.
The bombing acquired meaning only when Nato U-turned and summoned up the courage to invade. Not until Washington acceded to British demands for a ground invasion, as communicated to Mr Milosevic from the White House, did he retreat. He was not beaten from the air. He risked his army being beaten on the ground. In other words, the bombing was effective only in its classic military role, in support of actual or threatened land forces. How much death and destruction might have been averted if only this had been threatened from the start? Such a threat was said to be politically impossible, because it risked soldiers' lives. Perhaps, but that indicates the true extent of commitment to this "just war", and the true message sent to future dictators. Nato fights a cowards' war, a war by proxy, a war on the political cheap.
After the British victory in the Falklands, a Pentagon official remarked that "far from proving that aggression does not pay, Britain has only proved that resisting it is ridiculously expensive". Britain boasted that "never again" would a dictator challenge the will of a Western democracy. Saddam Hussein and Mr Milosevic have put paid to such naive deterrence theory. But even deterrence is subject to the law of proportionality. The British did not bomb Argentina in 1982 (although it was debated). They won the war without recourse to such crudity. British and American bombing of Belgrade since March must have equalled the destructive power of a nuclear warhead. If Nato genuinely believes that bombing "won a just war", what is to stop Nato using a nuclear weapon on any future ruler who defies its will, arguing that it might bring him faster to heel? The misreading of the bombing of Belgrade has made such a prospect more, not less, plausible.
The future will judge whether the West's attempt to police the break-up of former Yugoslavia has been "worth it". Only an arms salesman and a mortician could claim the past three months as credit. I remain convinced that the break-up was best left to the Yugoslavs to resolve themselves, with the outside world confining itself to charitable relief. This was the policy adopted by Britain - with no hysterical cries of "appeasement" or "you're doing nothing" - during the Croatian war and the Krajina clearances, and in Rwanda, Angola, Liberia, Congo, Algeria, Chechnya and Azerbaijan. In Croatia, the hands-off policy did not prevent ethnic cleansing, which was as bloodthirsty as in Kosovo, but that war was short and the resulting partition has proved stable. Bosnia was the turning point that made the Balkans "our business". Yet military intervention was tardy and half-hearted and merely froze a ceasefire line. The Nato colony is now the most dependent statelet in the world, not remotely a secure and autonomous nation. Everyone with experience of Bosnia expects Kosovo to be more, not less, problematic.
The impending ground operation will be messy. This is in part because immature Nato leaders are obsessed, not with rectifying the Kosovan disaster, but with a publicisable "victory" over the Serbs. It will also be messy if they continue to refuse (on what authority?) to allow Slav troops to protect Serb enclaves. But at least the lies, the name-calling and the random killing of the air war are over. Ground troops are real soldiers. I may disagree with this whole exercise, but once it began there was no honourable alternative to the British invasion strategy. Every bit of intelligence suggests that it was America's acceptance last week of this strategy (not some Wisconsin bombardier) that tipped the balance for Belgrade. Perhaps Britain's reputation for clear-headedness can recover from the ruins of Kosovo, even if Nato's cannot. As for the White House, it appears to have been happy to bomb Belgrade until Bill Clinton left office. He is still bombing Saddam. Like a medieval Pope, Mr Clinton's mind is not content unless he knows that heretics somewhere are being daily sacrificed to his god.
Kosovo is about to disappear from the political radar. Like Bosnia, it will settle down as a corrupt, expensive and probably blood-stained protectorate. As in Bosnia, the politicians will vanish, leaving soldiers to clean up the mess. Half-baked foreign adventures always degenerate thus, when the whizzbangs are silent and the cameras and the kings depart. Meanwhile the moral imperialists must keep moving or, like sharks, they will die. Where next shall they go? What separatist lurking in his cave is plotting to raise the banner of atrocity, to induce giants to spew bombs on some unsuspecting tyrant? Macedonia perhaps, or Armenia, or Pakistan? Spin the globe, you lords of empire, and jab in a pin.
simon.jenkins@the-times.co.uk
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